Michelle Mello (BA ’93) is a leading empirical health law scholar whose research is focused on understanding the effects of law and regulation on health care delivery and population health outcomes. She holds a joint appointment at the Stanford University School of Medicine in the Department of Health Policy.

Mello is the author of more than 250 articles on medical liability, public health law, the public health response to COVID-19, pharmaceuticals and vaccines, data ethics and privacy, biomedical research ethics and governance, and other topics. Her publications appear in medical, health policy, and law journals, and she serves on the Editorial Boards of JAMA Health Forum and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

In 2013, Mello was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (then called the Institute of Medicine), one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, in recognition of outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service. Mello’s work has also garnered the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from AcademyHealth, the leading professional organization for health services and health policy research in the U.S.; a Greenwall Faculty Scholars Award in Bioethics; a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research; an Open Science Champion Prize; and the John A. Benson Jr., MD Professionalism Article Prize.

Mello teaches Health Law: Improving Public Health and Torts. Prior to joining Stanford in 2014, she was a Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Director of the School’s Program in Law and Public Health.