Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research
Senior Program Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Kerry Anne McGeary joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2013 as a senior program officer in the Research-Evaluation-Learning unit. Coming to RWJF after a distinguished career as a professor of health economics at Ball State University, Drexel University, and the University of Miami, McGeary praises the Foundation as “an extraordinary opportunity to work on the most important and pressing problems facing our population today.” She employs her background in health economics and health policy research to help the Foundation achieve its mission and to assist its researchers in promoting a Culture of Health.

McGeary, the Phyllis A. Miller Professor of Health Economics at Ball State University in Indiana, directed Ball State’s Global Health Institute, which focuses on various issues related to the function of health care systems and the promotion of health. Prior to her work at Ball State, she was an active faculty member in the Department of Economics and International Business and School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where she received the Academic Leadership Award from the LeBow College of Business in 2003. She also served as an assistant professor at the University of Miami, where she was awarded the 2000 Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2008, she received the Southern Economic Association’s Georgesqu-Roegen “Best Paper” Prize for her paper entitled “Will Competitive Bidding Decrease Medicare Prices?” This paper, later used by Congress in Medicare deliberations, examined the use of competitive bidding to set reimbursement prices for durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics, and supplies.

McGeary received her BA in Economics from Lehigh University, and her MA and PhD in Economics from The Pennsylvania State University. She was a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Health Economics Research at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. She has written and presented extensively on health care economics, substance abuse, behavioral risk factors, and Medicare.