Celia Stafford is a doctoral student in Health Policy (Management). She received a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Emory University in 2017 and an MPH focused in Biostatistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2020. She is also affiliated with the System Dynamics Research Group at MIT. Outside of school, she has spent time as a research fellow at the FDA, a research associate at Harvard Medical School, in operations research for a cyber-security firm, and in operations and finance for multiple Contract Research Organizations (CROs).
Her research goal is to decrease inefficiencies in health care - particularly ones that have been frequently addressed and to poor effect. In particular, she is interested in using System Dynamics methods (a methodological framework to understand, and manage change by modeling the relationships between all parts of a system to see how those relationships influence the behavior of the system over time) to address policy resistance around electronic health record adoption, prior authorization, and drug pricing and innovation.