Kao-Ping Chua has been appointed as director of the Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center at the Medical School.

Chua takes over for Jeremy Adler, who has served as the interim director since July 2023. Chua is the Marilyn Fisher Blanch Research Professor of Child Health Policy and associate professor of pediatrics in the Medical School and associate professor of health management and policy in the School of Public Health.

In his new role, Chua looks forward to supporting the careers of other CHEAR faculty.

“As a junior faculty member, I spent a lot of time building up my own career, meeting milestones I was supposed to meet and proving that I belonged,” said Chua, who has been at U-M since 2017. “Now that I have had some success, I feel like it’s time for me to give back to CHEAR by supporting its faculty as much as I can. 

“I believe that by supporting their careers and augmenting their research, I can make more of an impact on the world and for child health than I could if I just continued doing my own research.”

The mission of CHEAR — one of the largest pediatric health services research centers in the United States, with 17 investigators and more than 30 staff members — is to advance the health and well-being of all children, adolescents and families through research and education.

“I’d like CHEAR to be a household name, not just in the pediatric health services research world but also in the greater health services research world,” he said. “I’d like to be able to introduce myself to an adult-focused researcher at a conference and have them know that CHEAR does good research, even if they don’t know exactly what we do.” 

Chua plans to enhance CHEAR’s national visibility through better external communications, having a stronger social-media presence, and implementing a standardized process for dissemination of research to the media.

“It also means that we should really come together as a faculty and identify key core initiatives that we become known for, whether they’re new or existing initiatives,” Chua said. “It’s really important that centers have those kinds of initiatives, so they can help brand themselves.”

Chua received his undergraduate degree in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University and his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis. He completed pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center and obtained a Ph.D. in health policy from Harvard University in 2015. 

Chua’s National Institutes of Health-funded research focuses on slowing the U.S. opioid epidemic, improving the affordability of health care, reducing the use of low-value care, and identifying emerging trends in pediatric health care utilization. 

His studies have been published in journals such as NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics, and Pediatrics, and have been covered by national media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and NPR. He is the recipient of the 2017 Academic Pediatric Association Young Investigator Award and the 2024 Nemours Child Health Services Research Award.