Anton L.V. Avanceña, Ph.D.

Anton Avanceña, Ph.D., M.S., is a decision scientist and health policy researcher who studies how efficiency and health equity can be improved. His main research area is behavioral health, including mental illness and substance use disorders such as alcohol misuse. Avanceña is especially interested in evaluating and ensuring access to treatments, pharmacotherapies and population-level interventions that can reduce the health, social and economic burden of behavioral health conditions and their downstream effects. Avanceña has conducted and continue to do research in other clinical areas such as pediatrics, hepatology and infectious diseases, among others.

Methodologically, Avanceña is interested in developing decision-analytic methods that advance a justice-oriented definition of value in health. He is a founding member of the Health Equity Research Special Interest Group at ISPOR and has presented his work on equity-informative methods at the Society for Medical Decision Making, AcademyHealth and the International Health Economics Association, where he also serves on various committees.

Avanceña received his Ph.D. in health services organization and policy from the University of Michigan, where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. He received his undergraduate and graduate training in public health from the University of California, San Francisco, and Santa Clara University.