Marissa Reitsma

Marissa Reitsma, from Acton, Massachusetts, is pursuing a PhD in health policy at Stanford School of Medicine. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor’s degree in biology. She aspires to reduce health inequalities, both within and between countries, through applied quantitative modeling that impacts health systems, policies, and programs. Marissa was a research assistant at Brown’s Center for AIDS Research, analyzing HIV drug resistance in resource-constrained settings. Following graduation, she pursued a Post-Bachelor Fellowship at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and has focused on non-communicable disease risk factors, including smoking and obesity. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, and she received a Jeremiah and Rose Stamler Research Award for New Investigators from the American Heart Association.