Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences

Emily O'Brien, PhD, is an associate professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Neurology at Duke University's School of Medicine. She is the therapeutic area lead for Population Health Sciences at the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI). Dr. O’Brien is also core faculty for the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy and co-hosts the DCRI's Beyond the Endpoint podcast. She has extensive experience in comparative effectiveness research, patient-centered outcomes, and pragmatic health systems research, with a focus on cardiovascular and pulmonary disease.

Dr. O’Brien's research portfolio spans multiple federally funded projects from the FDA, NIH, and PCORI, utilizing diverse data sources including registries, epidemiologic cohorts, electronic health records, and administrative claims data. Her expertise in epidemiologic methods and clinical decision sciences has advanced the understanding of how different treatments affect real-world patient outcomes. She also teaches Analytic Methods in the Department of Population Health Sciences PhD program, training the next generation of health outcomes researchers.

Dr. O’Brien has published more than 200 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals and serves as an associate editor for Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes and as the social media editor for the Journal of the American Heart Association (AHA). She is a fellow of the American Heart Association. Currently, she serves as chair of the AHA Quality of Care and Outcomes Research (QCOR) Scientific & Clinical Education Lifelong Learning Committee. Dr. O’Brien received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012.