Dr. Needleman is the Fred W. and Pamela K. Wasserman Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. He also teaches health policy courses in the master’s programs as well as research design methods to doctoral and MS students. Additionally, Dr. Needleman serves on CHBRP’s cost team. Previously, he taught courses related to program and policy evaluation and health politics. 

Dr. Needleman’s research focuses on how changing markets and public policy affect quality and access to health care, and how providers and insurers respond to regulatory and market incentives. Dr. Needleman’s publications on quality of care and nurse staffing are used by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality as patient safety classics, and the AHRQ, Medicare, Joint Commission, and National Quality Forum have adopted the quality measures he developed. Additionally, his research on how nurse staffing impacts patient outcomes received the first AcademyHealth Health Services Research Impact Award, and he was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine and made an honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. He was also lead evaluator for the Robert Wood Johnson initiative Transforming Care at the Bedside and currently serves on the Steering Council for the NIH-funded Improvement Science Research Network.

Dr. Needleman received his PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University. Prior to working at UCLA in 2003, he was Vice President and Co-Director of Lewin/ICF’s Public Policy Practice, a health policy research and consulting firm in Washington, and then he was on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health.