Dr. Sara Singer’s Biosketch
Faculty Director of the Health Leadership, Innovation, and Organizations (HELIO) Labs, Dr. Sara J. Singer, M.B.A., Ph.D., is a Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Professor of Organizational Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is Associate Director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center in the Department of Medicine and affiliated faculty with Stanford Department of Health Policy, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Clinical Excellence Research Center, Center for Innovation in Global Health, and Woods Institute for the Environment.
Dr. Singer studies health care teams and organizations to understand how leaders and policymakers can improve the safety, quality, and equity of health care delivery through changes in institutional culture, leadership, organization design, and team dynamics. Her research program addresses central challenges in health delivery (ensuring patient safety despite complexity and uncertainty; integrating fragmented services; implementing, adapting, and sustaining innovations that enhance value; and promoting a culture of health), where her research suggests that learning- and systems-oriented leaders and teams and supportive organizational cultures are critical factors for creating high performing delivery systems and collaborations. Her intellectual contributions include developing theoretical frameworks, interventions, valid and reliable data collection instruments, and evidence-bases for safety climate, organizational learning, integrated patient care, and culture of health.
She has served as principal investigator of numerous studies for the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Veterans Administration Health Services Research & Development, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and private foundations related to measuring and improving the financing and delivery of health care. Dr. Singer currently directs research programs, including a National Science Foundation program enabling the “Future of Work” in health care (2020-present), a NIH project to enhance Teaming for the “AI Ready and Equitable Atlas for Diabetes Insights (AI-READI)” (2022-present), and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-sponsored program on Corporations and Public Health (2019-present).
She served as a member of National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Transforming Health Care to Create Whole Health: Strategies to Assess, Scale, and Spread the Whole Person Approach to Health and currently serves as a member of the Lancet Commission on Transformative Research to Scale Mental Health Interventions. She also served for five-years as a leader of the Academy of Management Health Care Management Division, completing her term as Past Chair in 2022. She served as Chair of the Organization Theory in Health Care Association 2022-2023.
An internationally respected scientist and award-winning teacher, Dr. Singer received the 2013 Avedis Donabedian Healthcare Quality Award from the American Public Health Association, 2013 Lewis W. Blackman Patient Safety Champion Award, 2014 Teaching Citation Award from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and the 2019 Sherman Award for Excellence in Patient Engagement. Her publications have won numerous awards, including Best Paper awards from the Academy of Management’s Health Care Division in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2019, and 2023 and from the Production and Operations Management Society College of Service Operations 2015-2016. She earned her MBA from Stanford University and her PhD from Harvard University in Health Policy and Management. Dr. Singer has published more than 275 articles in academic journals and books on healthcare management, health policy, and health system reform.
