Health Policy PhD Students Win Big at SMDM Poster Competition
Health Policy PhD Students Win Big at SMDM Poster Competition
The Lee B. Lusted Student Prizes are awarded for outstanding student posters at the annual SMDM conference.
Two Stanford Health Policy PhD students claimed top honors at the annual Society for Medical Decision Making conference—each earning a Lee B. Lusted Student Prize for outstanding poster presentations.
Eliza Ennis, who is a PhD Candidate in decision sciences and a Knight-Hennessy scholar, earned the Milt Weinstein Award for Outstanding Presentation in Applied Health Economics. Her poster highlighted her research into the impact of contraceptive access on birth outcomes in Colombia. In this project, Ennis leverages a series of national price caps on contraceptive medications as a natural experiment to identify the causal relationship between price changes and fertility, teen pregnancy, and interpregnancy interval. She has worked closely on this project with her mentor and co-author, Natalia Serna, PhD, assistant professor of health policy, and is also advised by Professors Doug Owens, MD, and Josh Salomon, PhD.
This is Ennis’ second Lee B. Lusted Prize; she received an award for her microsimulation model of HIV, HCV, and opioid overdose at the 2024 Society for Medical Decision Making conference.
Hannah Thomas, MD, took home the Bruce Schackman Award for Outstanding Presentation in Health Services, Outcomes, and Policy Research. The urology resident at the University of Toronto, who is also a Knight-Hennessy scholar, presented a poster: Dynamic workforce modeling to inform surgical capacity planning in low-resource settings. Thomas has published extensively on key issues related to global surgical care.
Thomas, who has a master’s in global health sciences from UCSF and sits on the board of trustees for the International Student Surgical Network, says she is passionate about leveraging data to guide evidence-based health policy.
Other Stanford Health Policy faculty and trainees who attended the annual SMDM conference were Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert, Salomon, Fernando Alarid-Escudero, Marissa Reitsma, Himaja Nagireddy, and Zongbo Li.
The Lee B. Lusted Student Prizes are awarded for outstanding student posters at the annual meeting of the Society of Medical Decision Making, a nonprofit that brings together researchers, clinicians, educators, and policy makers to advance evidence-based approaches to health decisions and policy. The organization holds annual meetings in North America and publishes two journals: Medical Decision Making and MDM Policy & Practice.
The competition is named after Dr. Lee B. Lusted, a leader in advancing medical decision making as a field, the founding member of the Society in 1979, and the first editor of the Journal of Medical Decision Making.
