Thomas C. Tsai is a surgeon and health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Assistant Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, and Assistant Professor in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He leads a research team that studies the effectiveness and unintended consequences of health reform in the US. His wide-ranging work has included projects on the impact of Medicare payment policy on racial and socioeconomic disparities; the relationship between hospital management practices and outcomes; and the consequences of health system expansion on access to health care.

He is a faculty associate of the Center for Surgery and Public Health, Ariadne Labs, and the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he led policy research and response at the Harvard Global Health Institute. He served as Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the US Department of Health and Human Services from 2014-2015 and is currently the Vice-Chair of the Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME).

During the COVID-19 pandemic his work has focused on understanding the effect of the pandemic on the US health care system as well as in developing testing targets to inform state and federal pandemic response and preparedness (www.globalepidemics.org).