Friday 2 May 2025
09.00 PDT | 12.00 EDT | 16.00 UTC | 18.00 CEST
Featuring Lauren Cipriano, PhD and Brian Zikmund-Fisher, PhD

Professor, Management Science

Professor, Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Professor, Department of Medicine
Deputy Editor, Medical Decision Making and Medical Decision Making Policy & Practice
Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Analytics, Management, and Policy

Lauren Cipriano is a Professor in Management Science at the Ivey Business School where she is the Canada Research Chair in Healthcare Analytics, Management, and Policy. She holds cross appointments in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University.

Dr. Cipriano specializes in applying statistics, decision analysis, economics, and operations research to health policy problems. Her research focuses on the economic evaluation of clinical diagnostics and innovative therapeutics, resource allocation, and infectious disease policy. She has provided consulting services to prominent organizations including the World Health Organization, US Veterans Health Administration, US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the US Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, and Canada’s Drug Agency (formerly, the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH)). During the pandemic, Dr. Cipriano served on the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table’s Modelling Consensus Table.

Dr. Cipriano is an Investigator with the Toronto Health Economics and Technology Assessment (THETA) Collaborative and a Research Affiliate with the Center for Health Economics of Treatment Interventions for Substance Use Disorder, HCV, and HIV (CHERISH).  From 2019 to 2023, she served on the Health Economics Methods Advisory Committee for Canada’s Drug Agency and was awarded the Dr. Maurice McGregor Award for Health Technology Assessment in 2019.

Dr. Cipriano is the Deputy Editor of the journals Medical Decision Making and MDM Policy & Practice.

Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher, PhD

• Professor, Health Behavior and Health Equity
• Research Professor, Internal Medicine
• Interim Co-Director, Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine

• Courses TaughtCourses Taught
• Book:Michigan Research Experts
• Website:Free risk graphics generator

Question: How can we help people understand the information they need to make better health decisions?

Dr. Zikmund-Fisher has devoted his career to working on this issue. Much of his work focuses on designing and evaluating methods of making health data such as risk statistics or laboratory test results more intuitively meaningful to patients, clinicians, and policymakers. He also studies the impact of people’s consistent preferences for more versus less health care on over- and underutilization of care and explores the power of narratives in health communications. Many of his projects involve collaborations with clinicians in a wide range of specialties including internal medicine, family medicine, oncology, ophthalmology, gastroenterology, surgery, and pharmacy. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journals Medical Decision Making and MDM Policy and Practice.

Dr. Zikmund-Fisher teaches graduate courses that focus on enabling students to communicate health and science information clearly and memorably. He is working with several collaborators to explore the use of improvisational theater games as tools for building health and science communication skills.