Faculty Collaborators

Vahakn Shahinian, MD, MS

Dr. Shahinian’s research interests include patterns and health outcomes in the treatment of prostate cancer; patterns and determinants of survivorship care in prostate cancer; and examination of quality of care in chronic kidney disease using administrative data.

Contact: vahakn@med.umich.edu

Richard Hirth, PhD

Dr. Richard Hirth is a health economist and Professor or Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan. His research interests include insurance design and plan choice, healthcare costs, Medicare policy for kidney disease care, ownership of healthcare providers, and long-term care. His work includes the research underlying design of the Medicare bundled payment system for kidney dialysis. Dr. Hirth has over 100 publications in journals including the Journal of Health Economics, Health Services Research, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. He received the Kenneth Arrow Award in Health Economics, the AcademyHealth Impact Award, the Excellence in Research Award in Health Policy from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation, and the Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration. Dr. Hirth serves as the Research Director of the Value-Based Insurance Design Center, member of the Executive Faculty group of the Kidney Epidemiology and Cost Center, Deputy Editor of Medical Care, and recently completed his term as Chair of the Department of Health Management and Policy.

Contact: rhirth@umich.edu

Yajuan Si, PhD

Dr. Si is a Research Assistant Professor (tenure track) in the Survey Methodology Program, located within the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus. She received her Ph.D on Statistical Science in 2012 from Duke University. Before joining the University of Michigan in 2017, Dr. Si was an assistant professor jointly in the Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics and the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University.

Dr Si's research lies in cutting-edge methodology development in streams of Bayesian statistics, complex survey inference, missing data imputation, causal inference, and data confidentiality protection. She has extensive collaboration experiences with health services researchers and epidemiologists to improve healthcare and public health practice, and has been providing statistical support to solve sampling and analysis issues on health and social science surveys.

Contact: yajuan@umich.edu

Edward Norton, PhD

Edward C. Norton is a Professor in both the Department of Health Management and Policy and in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. In addition to his affiliations with the University of Michigan, Prof. Norton is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Health Economics Program. His research interests in health economics include long-term care and aging, pay-for-performance, obesity, and econometrics. He was the Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. In 2003, Before coming to Michigan, he taught at UNC at Chapel Hill and at Harvard Medical School. In 2018 he won the School of Public Health Excellence in Research Award at the University of Michigan.

Contact: ecnorton@umich.edu

Andy Ryan, PhD

Dr. Ryan has a PhD in Social Policy with a concentration in Health Policy from the Heller School of Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. He won the 2009 AcademyHealth Dissertation Award for "The Design of Value Based Purchasing in Medicare: Theory and Empirical Evidence." Prior to coming to Michigan, Dr. Ryan was an Associate Professor of Public Health in the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Dr. Ryan is the Director of the Center for Evaluating Health Reform. He is also the co-Director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy, and the Associate Director of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation’s Data and Methods Hub.

Contact: amryan@umich.edu

Xianshi Yu, PhD, MPhil

Xianshi Yu is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Dept. of Statistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2018. Her research interest lies in statistical learning problems motivated various from real applications. Her research areas include Signal Processing and Network Data Analysis, and her current focus is on analyzing Hypergraph Data. Xianshi also conducts applied research concerning a variety of topics in healthcare.

Contact: xsyu@umich.edu

Russell Funk, PhD

Russell Funk is an assistant professor in the Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship group at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. Before joining the faculty at Minnesota, he earned his PhD in economic sociology at the University of Michigan, where he received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies. He earned his AB from the University of Chicago. During that time, he also worked at Argonne National Laboratory in the Materials Science Division.

His research has appeared or is forthcoming in leading management and health care journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Medical Care, and Annals of Surgery. His work has received recognition from several different professional societies, including the Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Technology and Innovation Management Division and the James D. Thompson Award (honorable mention), given by the American Sociological Association’s section on Organizations, Occupations and Work.

Funk’s research is driven by the idea that the growing availability of large administrative, government, and web data sets create novel opportunities for management research, and he has been active in applying the tools of big data to social science. These efforts have led to invited presentations and meetings with data science groups at organizations including the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory's Computation Institute, Internet2, Microsoft, Michigan's Office of Research Cyberinfrastructure, and the Gordon and Betty Moore and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. While at the University of Michigan, he was the founding chair of a users group aimed at exploring the intersection of big data and organizational studies.

Contact: rfunk@umn.edu

Dennie Kim, PhD

Dennie Kim is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship area at Darden. His research examines the design and performance of whole organizational networks, with particular interest in US healthcare delivery and reform. Current work examines the networks of Medicare Accountable Care Organizations and surgical procedures, as well as the emergence of retail health clinics in the US.

He earned his PhD in Business Administration from the University of Minnesota, and AB in Biology from Harvard University. Prior to joining academia, he worked for several years as a strategy consultant in the biopharmaceutical industry and project manager in hospital administration.

Contact: kimd@darden.virginia.edu

Ryan Hsi, MD

Ryan Hsi, MD is an assistant professor in the Department of Urology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He completed a laparoscopy and endourology fellowship at the University of California San Francisco and internship and a residency at the University of Washington. His clinical areas of interest are performing the medical and surgical management of kidney stone disease and minimally invasive urologic surgery for benign upper tract disease. Dr. Hsi’s focus of research is in the epidemiology, treatment and prevention of kidney stones.

Contact: ryan.hsi@vumc.org

Sunny Lin, PhD, MS

Sunny Lin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health whose research centers around the role of health information technology (IT) in facilitating care coordination. Her research explores the impact of IT in the context of payment reform, patient-centered innovations, and referral networks on patient experience, quality, and cost of care.

Contact: sunlin@pdx.edu