Lori Melichar is a labor economist and the Senior Director of the Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future Team at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where she leads a team that is focused on discovering, exploring and learning from cutting edge ideas and emerging trends that have the potential to advance Health Equity in America. She is also the host of the Foundation’s Pioneering Ideas podcast. Over the past 19 years, Melichar has created and managed several programs to focus a broad research community on studies to improve health and healthcare policy and practice, and was a key driver of efforts to advance the science of quality improvement (QI) research and evaluation at the Foundation. From 2008-2010, she served as the Research Director for the Future of Nursing Committee, at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She holds a PhD and MA in economics from the University of Maryland at College Park and a BA in economics from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.