Harald Schmidt, PhD, MA is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and a Research Associate at the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE), both at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests are centered around improving opportunity and reducing disadvantage for marginalized populations in health promotion and healthcare priority setting. He proposed a way of integrating disadvantage indices such as the Area Deprivation Index to improve equitable ventilator and vaccine allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and current work examines the ways in which states implemented it, and what can be learned from the rapid adoption for public health policy more broadly. He is also interested in the ethics of novel medication adherence monitoring technologies that can veer between depersonalizing surveillance and genuine patient support. The overall goal of his research is to combine robust conceptual and empirical work to contribute to more evidence-based, equitable and efficient health care policy and practice.
Before coming to Penn, Dr. Schmidt was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health, and for seven years served as Assistant Director of the U.K.’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics in London. He completed his PhD in Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s LSE Health. Dr. Schmidt is also a member of UNESCO’s Ethics Task Force.
