Michelle M. Mello

- Professor of Law
- Professor of Health Policy
- Room 324, Neukom Building
Expertise
- Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Bioethics
- Data Ethics
- Food & Drug Administration
- Health Law & Policy
- Medical Malpractice
- Policy Analysis
- Public Health Law
- Public Policy & Empirical Studies
- Torts
Biography
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 Medicine.
Mello is the author of more than 200 articles on medical liability, public health law, pharmaceuticals and vaccines, biomedical research ethics and governance, health information privacy, and other topics. Her investigations into the dynamics of medical malpractice litigation, the effects of medical liability reforms, the ability of hospitals to shift costs of medical errors to others, and allocating responsibility for medical errors between hospital systems and individual physicians have been particularly impactful. Mello’s publications appear in medical, health policy, and law journals, and she is a frequent contributor to the New England Journal of Medicine.
In 2013, Mello was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly known as 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; and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.
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, as well as a Lab Fellow at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.
Education
- BA, Stanford University, 1993
- MPhil, Oxford University, 1995
- PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999
- JD, Yale Law School, 2000
Faculty on Point | Prof. Michelle M. Mello on Solving Medical Liability
Key Works
News
The ‘next Ozempic’ became a social media sensation. Then everything changed
The Independent
People with obesity are angry that obesity isn’t recognized as a disease. And users who can’t afford it say they’ve been abandoned by Big Pharma. This is why Lilly’s decision to change its coupon terms hit patients so hard. “Not only were patients probably not aware that there was a…
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