Senior Physician Policy Researcher, RAND; Professor of Policy Analysis, RAND School of Public Policy
She/Her
Laura Faherty is a senior physician policy researcher at RAND, professor at the RAND School of Public Policy, associate professor of Pediatrics, attending physician at MaineHealth, and Maine's site PI of an NIH-funded multi-center pediatric clinical trials network. She was the RAND Global Scholar in Pandemic Preparedness from 2024-2025. Before joining RAND, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.
A practicing general pediatrician with public health and health services research training, Faherty's work focuses on maternal-child health and pandemic preparedness and response, in both U.S. and non-U.S. settings. Her current research focuses on building trust in public health through social media, early warning systems for potential pandemics such as wastewater surveillance, impacts of school-associated vaccination on vaccination rates, and perinatal behavioral health. She recently published a toolkit funded by CDC on conducting behavioral health surveillance in the disaster context, supported the development of the 2020 Vaccines National Strategic Plan, contributed to The Rockefeller Foundation's national playbook for COVID-19 testing in K–12 schools, and evaluated the impact of The Rockefeller Foundation's Equity-First COVID-19 Vaccination Initiative. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, the UN Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the CDC, among others.
Faherty completed her residency and chief residency in pediatrics at Boston Medical Center and Boston Children's Hospital. She received her M.D. and M.P.H. in global epidemiology from Emory University, and her M.S. in health policy research from the University of Pennsylvania.
M.D., Emory University School of Medicine; M.P.H. in global epidemiology, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health; M.S.H.P. in health policy research, University of Pennsylvania; B.A. in history of science, Princeton University
Spanish
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Tufts University School of Medicine; Associate Director, Barbara Bush Children's Hospital Scholars Academy; Attending Physician, Maine Medical Center
