Denise Dougherty

Board Member 

Denise Dougherty, PhD is Senior Scholar-in-Residence at AcademyHealth, a Board member of ACT for Health, and a nationally recognized expert on child and adolescent health. Dr. Dougherty brings decades of work on evidence and quality to ACT for Health’s work on upstream determinants of adolescent wellbeing, with a focus on high school-aged teens’ psychological, social, and emotional wellbeing.
She currently directs an AcademyHealth-ACT for Health project funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation of Pittsburgh addressing teen mental health crises. 

Denise served for many years as Senior Advisor for Child Health and Quality Improvement at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), where she most recently led the pediatric quality measures program. In addition, she was the Agency’s lead on methods for healthcare quality improvement and implementation science. During her AHRQ tenure, she represented AHRQ on numerous interagency initiatives, including autism, newborn heritable disorders, perinatal care, children’s healthcare quality, and dissemination and implementation science. Dr. Dougherty is the author of numerous publications on issues such as disparities in access and quality for children.
 

Previously, Denise led the Education and Human Resources Program and the Adolescent Health Report for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Denise has two grown children and two emerging young adult grandchildren, giving her an intense personal interest in enhancing adolescent wellbeing.