Elizabeth H. Bradley

Elizabeth H. Bradley, PhD has served as President of Vassar since July 2017 and is deeply engaged with research on the performance and quality of higher education institutions in the US. With her leadership, Vassar has established partnerships in India, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom to develop models of liberal arts higher education in these settings. In addition, Vassar has collaborated with Columbia University to create a 5-year BA-MPH program and the University of Edinburgh to create a 5-year BA-MSc in Planetary Health and Sustainability.

Prior to becoming the President of Vassar, Bradley, a noted public health expert, was on the faculty at Yale for more than twenty years. She has directed the Health Management Program in the Yale School of Public Health and co-directed the RWJ Clinical Scholars program. The first director of Yale’s Global Health Initiative, Bradley helped to create the first Masters of Health Administration on the African continent with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and pioneered a model of scale up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bradley has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, written 35 book chapters, and co-authored three books including The American Healthcare Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less. She is the 2018 recipient of the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bradley graduated phi beta kappa from Harvard in economics magna cum laude, earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in health economics from Yale University.