Dr. Teresa Meyers Waters, PhD

Endowed Professor and Chair

Dr. Teresa M. Waters is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Management and Policy and Associate Dean for Research. She is also the Charles T. Wethington, Jr., Endowed Chair in the Health Sciences. A health economist, her research focuses on health care financing and health policy. She is especially interested in innovations in health care delivery and payment and has several funded research projects that focus on the implementation and impact of “value-based payment” polices.

Dr. Waters joined the UK College of Public Health in December 2017. Prior to joining UK, she served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine in the College of Medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC-Memphis). She was a faculty member at UTHSC for 18 years.

Prior to her tenure at UTHSC, she was a research associate professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Health Services Research and Policy Studies at Northwestern University (1992 – 2000). In this position, she was responsible for managing the Institute’s budget, overseeing faculty research, and leading strategic planning efforts. She also served as PI on numerous grants and taught health economics in the Department of Economics.

Over the past decade, Dr. Waters and her research has been funded continuously by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Dr. Water's AHRQ grantee profile can be found here.