Michelle Keller, PhD, MPH

University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California

Dr. Keller is an Assistant Professor at the Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Keller serves on CHBPR's cost team. Dr. Keller's research has involved improving medication management among older patients, reducing low-value health care, promoting patient-clinician communication, and using informatics to improve patient safety.

Dr. Keller is currently working on the design and evaluation of interventions for deprescribing high-risk medications including opioids, benzodiazepines, and antipsychotics in older adults. She has recently conducted research to examine health disparities in antipsychotic prescribing in Latino older adults with dementia, reasons underlying the adoption of opioid risk mitigation strategies, and how prescription-level data can be utilized to understand opioid and benzodiazepine prescriptions on a population level. Dr. Keller has also been involved in informatics research to study the effectiveness of health information technologies aimed at improving medical decision-making, and she has co-authored peer-reviewed papers on various topics, such as how bedside computers hinder communication in critical care surgical units and the impact of computerized appropriateness alerts on patients’ length of stay and inpatient costs.

Dr. Keller received both her MPH and PhD from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management, and her BA in Human Biology from Stanford University. Prior to working in the field of health policy and services, she worked as a journalist for national newspapers including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.