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Lori Post, Ph.D.

Buehler Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University

Lori Ann Post, PhD is the Buehler Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medical Social Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine. She is the inaugural Director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics. She moved from Michigan State (Assistant Prof and Research Dean), Yale University (Associate Prof and Research Director, Research Section Chief), and now full professor and center director at Northwestern University. She did her dissertation (Applied Demography) indirectly estimating the invisible population of elderly women being abused and exploited, funded by CDC. She was funded by the Center for Medicare to develop a background check system to vet the healthcare workforce for persons in long-term care. The state of Michigan is the only pilot state still using the system. Dr. Post wrote the legislation for “Best Practices in background checks for the Affordable Healthcare Act which appropriated $3,000,000 per state and territory to develop a system similar to Michigan. Dr. Post has also been funded by Medicaid to derive estimates of various types of abuse and disabilities. 

Dr. Post is working on a variety of injury studies. First, related to the opioid crisis, she is working on patterns, hotspots, and spatial heterogeneity of opioid overdose deaths; economic drivers of the opioid epidemic by looking at how pharmaceutical companies incentivizing physicians to write opioid prescriptions, which results in increased prescriptions and overdose deaths; and the social construction of addiction. In the area of aging she is: funded by the Department of Justice to develop an abuse, neglect, and financial exploitation screening tool(Dept of Justice); working with the Vice President for International Relations to link aging researchers from Northwestern with investigators working in similar areas in Israel, Hong Kong, and Singapore; and helping the Mayer-Rothschild Foundation to develop a measure of excellence in Long-Term Care facilities. Finally, Dr. Post is examining adverse health outcomes of food insecurity and how they result in human right's violations.

Dr. Post's recent publications include: