Meredith Doherty, PhD, LCSW, conducts mixed-method, community-engaged research to understand the relationship between economic security and health. She examines how medical financial hardship accelerates existing racial and ethnic health disparities. Drawing on her clinical experience as a palliative care social worker in safety-net community hospitals, Doherty develops, implements, and evaluates health care–based social needs interventions that target downstream social determinants of health in medically underserved populations.
As an implementation scientist, she investigates the role of community and organizational leaders in delivering evidence-based strategies to promote health care access, address health-related social needs, and reduce cancer health disparities.
Doherty is a Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and faculty member at both the Center for Guaranteed Income Research and the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation. She is lead investigator of the Guaranteed Income and Financial Treatment Trial (G.I.F.T.T.), the first randomized controlled trial of guaranteed income in the U.S. focused on alleviating financial hardship in families facing cancer.
At the School of Social Policy & Practice, Doherty teaches courses in health policy and social work/nonprofit leadership. Doherty received her MSW from the Silver School of Social Work at New York University and her PhD in Social Welfare from the CUNY Graduate Center, and was Co-Chief Research Fellow in Psycho-Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
