Senior Advisor for Mental Health Services, Epidemiology, and Economics, National Institute of Mental Health
Dr. Schoenbaum directs a unit charged with conducting analyses of mental health burden, service use and costs, intervention opportunities, and other policy-related issues, in support of Institute decision-making; and with helping to strengthen NIMH’s relationships with outside stakeholders, to increase the public health impact of NIMH-supported research.
Dr. Schoenbaum’s research has focused particularly on the costs and benefits of interventions to improve health and health care, evaluated from the perspectives of patients, providers, payers and society. He has been a scientific principal in NIMH’s Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (http://www.armystarrs.org; now STARRS-LS); and has worked on initiatives with the Veterans Health Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the National Business Group on Health, among others.
Prior to joining NIMH, Dr. Schoenbaum spent nine years at the RAND Corporation, where his work included studies of the feasibility and consequences of improving care for common mental disorders, particularly depression; studies of the social epidemiology and economic consequences of chronic illness and disability; design and evaluation of decision-support tools to help consumers make health benefits choices; and international health sector development projects.
Dr. Schoenbaum was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in health policy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995-1997. He holds a PhD in Economics from University of Michigan.