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Ellen Beckjord

Ellen Beckjord


Adjunct Faculty; Associate Vice President, Population Health and Clinical Affairs, UPMC Health Plan, Insurance Services Division

Dr. Beckjord did her training in clinical psychology at the University of Vermont, where she worked with cancer survivors and their families delivering evidence-based behavioral medicine interventions from time of diagnosis through end-of-life care.

After completing her internship at the Vanderbilt-VA internship consortium, she entered the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program and spent her first year of fellowship getting a Masters in Public Health focused on Epidemiology and Biostatistics. At the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Beckjord did her post-doctoral research in the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch within the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences. From NCI, Dr. Beckjord spent three years in research consulting with RAND Corporation before spending nearly five years in academic medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and Hillman Cancer Center, where she received a Career Development Award to develop and test a context-aware mobile application for smoking cessation. In February 2015, she joined the UPMC Health Plan where she serves as the Associate Vice President of Population Health and Clinical Affairs.

Her current work is focused on behavioral informatics and population health; specifically, the use of digital tools in clinical operations to promote health, wellness, and health behavior change, and designing, testing, and optimizing population health management strategies. She is particularly interested in the role of consumer generated health data in an informatics-enabled learning health care system.