ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2024
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH, is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, Director of Health Equity Research and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. She is a practicing general internist and health policy researcher whose work focuses on ensuring the viability of the health care safety-net for low-income patients. She conducts rigorous empirical work on safety-net hospital financing and quality of care, rural and urban health disparities that disproportionately affect low-income populations, and the role of health policy in mitigating population health disparities. Her work has been nationally recognized for its use of novel descriptive approaches and causal inference methods to reveal mechanisms of structural inequity in health care delivery and payment structures. Dr. Chatterjee's research and viewpoints have been featured in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, Health Affairs, and the American Journal of Public Health. Her work has had important policy impact at both the state and national levels. Dr. Chatterjee has testified for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Health on the role of payment policy in ensuring hospital viability, and conducted research with state-level policymakers to measure the degree of administrative burden that would have been associated with instituting a Medicaid work requirement in Pennsylvania. Nationally, her work on safety-net hospital financing has been awarded the Best Paper of the Year Award in 2023 from the Society of General Internal Medicine, and has influenced discussions held by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission and the Medicaid and CHIP Payment & Access Commission, both of which advise Congress on national health care payment policy. Dr. Chatterjee completed her residency and chief residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She received her MD from Harvard Medical School, and her MPH and undergraduate degrees from Yale University. She practices inpatient medicine in West Philadelphia.