Danya Qato, PhD, PharmD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Practice, Sciences, and Health Outcomes Research (P-SHOR) at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy
Dr. Danya M. Qato is a practicing pharmacist, epidemiologist, and health services researcher. She holds a PhD in health and pharmaceutical services research from the Brown University School of Public Health, a Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD) from the University of Illinois, and a Master of Public Health (MPH) with a concentration in international health and humanitarian studies from Harvard University. In 2020, she was selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leader. Dr. Qato served as Graduate Program Director (GPD) of the Pharmaceutical Health Services Research Graduate Program for over 5 years, leading the program from 2018-2023. Select accomplishments enacted during her tenure as GPD include higher student stipends, greater engagement of students in department governance, more streamlined career services and professional engagement opportunities, and better infrastructure and environmental support for students. Dr. Qato also created and led the first ever PHSR Graduate Program Health Equity Book Club focused on equity in the field of pharmaceutical health services research and public health more broadly. The books covered include Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble, Fatal Invention by Dorothy Roberts, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (edited volume by Alice Wong), and The Black Butterfly by Lawrence Brown. This series, which ran for 4 years, has fostered healthy discussion within the department about the role of racism and other forms of discrimination in shaping our research and in shaping health outcomes. It has also helped elucidate the active role we can play as researchers and advocates in improving health equity. Dr. Qato successfully led an extensive successful external review of the graduate program that included a comprehensive examination of the curriculum and student experiences. She was awarded the University of Maryland School of Medicine Department of Epidemiology Faculty Teaching Award at the 2023 Commencement for her foundational course on “Principles of Epidemiology”.
Dr. Qato’s research is currently funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Food and Drug Administration, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. At Brown, Dr. Qato was funded as an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and National Institutes of Health doctoral and postdoctoral research fellow in comparative effectiveness research.
Dr. Qato’s substantive areas of research pertain to improving regulatory and policy tools to reduce use of high risk medications in vulnerable populations, substance use and women’s health, risk management and post-marketing surveillance, drug pricing and access to essential medicines, environmental and global health systems development, pharmacovigilance, and global health equity. She was previously a Schweitzer Fellow, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow (for support of her MPH at Harvard), and a U.S. research fellow of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences funded by the Swedish International Development Agency. In the 2015-2016 academic year, Dr. Qato was based at the Institute for Community and Public Health at Birzeit University in Palestine, where she was a Fulbright Scholar and served as an expert consultant to the World Health Organization. In addition to her role as an associate professor in the Department of Practice, Sciences, and Health Outcomes Research (P-SHOR), Dr. Qato holds a secondary appointment in the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, is a faculty affiliate at the University of Maryland Institute for Global Health, and a faculty member of the joint UMB/UMBC PhD Program in Gerontology. She is former chair of the Drug Policy and Pharmaceutical Services Committee of the Medical Care Section of the American Public Health Association and is a member of the Public Health subcommittee of the Maryland State Taskforce on Reconciliation and Equity.
Current funding as Principal Investigator:
Food and Drug Administration funded (7/1/2020-present): Data-informed Models to Identify Optimal Opioid Use Disorder Treatment Trajectories
KL2 Scholar (7/1/2019-present): Towards a multidisciplinary program to improve healthcare provision and outcomes for pregnant and postpartum women with complex polysubstance use
Published Reports:
Contact Information:
Danya M. Qato, PhD, PharmD, MPH
Associate Professor of Practice, Sciences, and Health Outcomes Research
University of Maryland School of Pharmacy
220 Arch Street, 12th Floor
Baltimore, MD 21201
Office: (410) 706-4044
Email: dqato@rx.umaryland.edu