Bio
Colleen L. Barry, a nationally and internationally recognized research scholar, educator and leader in the areas of mental health and addiction policy and policy communication, is the inaugural dean of the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
She formerly was the Fred and Julie Soper Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Professor Barry’s research focuses on how health and social policies can affect a range of outcomes for individuals with mental illness and substance use disorders, including access to medical care and social services, care quality, health care spending, financial protection and mortality. She is involved in numerous research studies examining the implications of health insurance expansions and health care delivery system reform efforts on the treatment of mental illness and substance use disorders. She also conducts empirical research to understand how communication strategies influence public attitudes about addiction, mental illness and violence. One focus of this work is to identify evidence-based approaches to reducing stigma. She has authored over 160 peer-reviewed articles on these topics. Dr. Barry is founding co-Director (with Elizabeth Stuart) of the Johns Hopkins Center for Mental Health and Addiction Policy Research and is a core faculty member in the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research. She is Principal Investigator of the Johns Hopkins NIMH T32 Mental Health Services and Systems Training Grant providing pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships to train scholars who will become leaders in the mental health services and systems research field. Professor Barry received her Ph.D. in health policy from Harvard University and her masters degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.