Rani Elwy, Ph.D.

Rani Elwy is passionate about the implementation and sustainment of evidence-based practices in routine clinical and community-based settings. She focuses on this through her roles as: 1) a Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where she is the founding director of the Brown Research on Implementation and Dissemination to Guide Evidence Use (BRIDGE) program, an implementation science capacity building and research program, and 2) a Research Career Scientist at the VA Bedford Healthcare System, where she is multiple principal investigator of two VA programs to bring evidence-based treatments to clinical and community-based settings to improve Veterans’ health and healthcare.

Dr. Elwy is known for her research on communicating adverse events that occur during the course of patients’ healthcare. She received the VA Health Systems Research Best Research Paper award in 2017 for her team’s work on surgeon’s disclosures of clinical adverse events, and in 2018, their research leading to a Large-Scale Disclosure Toolkit became part of the standard operating procedure of the VA’s Clinical Episode Review Team. Dr. Elwy has served on workgroups in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the World Health Organization to use her team’s work on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy to build trust in vaccines through implementation of evidence-based communication strategies to increase its uptake in the U.S. and globally.

She received her AB in psychology and sociology from the University of Michigan, an MSc in social psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD in health psychology from King’s College London. Dr. Elwy is a former Fellow of the Implementation Research Institute and an elected Fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. She previously served on committees of AcademyHealth and the American Board of Pediatrics and is the recipient of two mentoring awards and four excellence in teaching awards. Dr. Elwy is a Class of 2024 member of the Presidential Leadership Scholars program, an advanced leadership training program through the presidential centers of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson.