Dr. Elissa R. Weitzman is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, and Faculty in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. A social-behavioral scientist and psychiatric epidemiologist, her research focuses on understanding pediatric onset chronic disease including through mapping psychosocial and behavioral risks faced by affected youth, and through quantifying patterns of disease and treatment burden. Much of her work is geared toward advancing integration of patient-centered outcome measures into research and care to improve healthcare and health status/quality of life. She is currently defining the intersection of chronic disease and substance use epidemics for adolescents/young adults, a vanguard area. Her projects employ a mixed methods toolkit that spans narrative to large-sample prospective cohort studies, experiments and informatics-enabled investigations that hinge on engaging patients in setting the research agenda and in receiving contextualizing health information derived from their research participation. Her work has informsed wide-ranging policy efforts, including those focused on adolescent substance use, medically vulnerable youth, and advancing the quality and safety of online disease-focused communities and e-health tools.
Dr. Weitzman received her Masters and Doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, and completed her post-doctoral training fellowships in Medical Ethics and Public Health in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Weitzman's research is supported by grants from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institutes of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (NIAMS), and the Substance Abuse and the Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).