Paul D Cleary, PhD

Paul D. Cleary, Ph.D. is the Anna M.R. Lauder Professor Emeritus of public health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. and Dean Emeritus of Public Health.

Dr. Cleary received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin. His earliest work focused on studies of health behavior. He conducted theoretical and empirical research on smoking as well as patients’ perceptions and responses to physical symptoms and factors affecting use of medical care. He also studied the recognition and management of conditions such as mental illness, alcohol abuse and functional impairment in primary care settings.

For much of his career, Dr. Cleary has been actively involved in research focused on persons infected with HIV. He has investigated the ways in which infection affects people’s lives and the factors affecting the quality of medical care for infected persons. He led a key component of the HIV Costs and Services Utilization Study (HSCUS), in which his team investigated the physician and clinic characteristics that predict the quality of care that patients receive. He also conducted a major national evaluation of a quality improvement program in HIV clinics funded by the Ryan White Care Act.

He has studied how organizational characteristics affect the costs and quality of care for persons with AIDS; evaluated a national continuous quality improvement initiative in clinics providing care to HIV infected individuals; and studied the long-term impact of patient-centered hospital care. He is Principal Investigator of one of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) projects funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to develop information gathering surveys for consumers regarding their health plans and services. He has published more than 350 journal articles describing his research.

Dr. Cleary has been a member of the Academy of Medicine (AOM) since 1994 and served as Chair of two AOM Committees: the Committee on the Ryan White CARE Act: Data for Resource Allocation, Planning and Evaluation in 2002-2003, and the Committee on HIV Screening and Access to Care from 2010 to 2011. He has also been a member of the Connecticut Academy for Science and Engineering since 2007. In 1996, he was selected as a distinguished fellow of the Association for Health Services Research, and in 2002, received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy. In 2010, Dr. Cleary was awarded the Picker Award for Excellence in the Advancement of Patient-Centered Care by the Picker Institute. In 2018, he received the L:eo G. Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology.

From 2005 to 2016 Dr. Cleary chaired the National Advisory Committee for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research Program. He has served as editor of The Milbank Quarterly, associate editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, consulting editor of the Journal of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and an editorial board member of The Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine and the Advanced Handbook of Methods in Evidence Based Health Care.