Susan Ettner

Susan Ettner is Professor in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Health Services Research in the UCLA Department of Medicine and in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. Dr. Ettner currently serves as Dean of Graduate Education at UCLA, providing oversight for over 12,000 academic and professional graduate students in 133 degree programs. As a first-gen college graduate, she earned her bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics/Economics and German from UCSB and a doctorate in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Ettner served as faculty in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School before joining UCLA in 1999.  In her role as HPM faculty, she taught and developed course materials for advanced research methods classes for the HPM doctoral students. With over 220 peer-reviewed publications, in 2021 Dr. Ettner was recognized as being one of the most highly-cited researchers in her field from 1960-2020. She has served as the Principal Investigator on 26 grants or sub-awards and as a Co-Investigator on 50 others. Her current research focuses primarily on insurance and behavioral health policy. Most recently, Dr. Ettner led a comprehensive NIDA-funded evaluation of the impact of the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act on insurance coverage and treatment for mental and substance use disorders), demonstrating that this landmark piece of legislation led to some improvements in insurance coverage and treatment for mental health and substance use disorders.  Dr. Ettner is also a former Task Force member for the California Health Benefits Review Program, which provides independent analyses of the medical, financial, and public health impacts of proposed health insurance benefit mandates.

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Education


  • PhD, Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
  • B.A., Mathematics/Economics, University of California Santa Barbara
  • B.A., German, University of California Santa Barbara

Selected Publications