Rebecca Haffajee

After receiving her law degree from Harvard Law School and a Masters in public health from Harvard School of Public Health in 2006, Dr. Haffajee practiced as a regulatory health care attorney for several years at Ropes & Gray LLP, where she advised domestic health care providers on regulatory compliance and reimbursement matters. She then served as a law fellow at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. She completed her Ph.D. in health policy (concentrating in evaluative science and statistics) at Harvard University in 2016. She was an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan, and subsequently spent several years as a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Most recently, Dr. Haffajee served under the Biden-Harris Administration as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) from March 2021 through January 2025; she also served as the Acting ASPE and the ASPE nominee before the U.S. Senate during that time.

A lawyer and health policy researcher, Dr. Haffajee's research combines detailed legal analyses with empirical investigations of the relationships between law and health. She explores the ways in which law facilitates or serves as a barrier to patient access to quality health care and improved population health outcomes. She substantively focuses in the behavioral health and pharmaceutical policy areas, evaluating policies such as mental health/substance abuse parity and laws intended to curb opioid misuse and overdose. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the AcademyHealth Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, and JAMA Psychiatry and covered in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio.