Biographies
Marc N. Elliott (Ph.D. Statistics, Rice University) is a senior principal researcher at RAND and
holds its Distinguished Chair in Statistics. His areas of interest include health disparities,
Medicare, vulnerable populations, healthcare experiences, profiling of health care institutions,
survey sampling, experimental design, casual inference, and case-mix adjustment in US and UK
applications. He has developed Bayesian methods of estimating race/ethnicity and associated
disparities using surname and address information. Marc led Office of Minority Health work
developing novel, cost-effective sampling and analytic methods to improve national health
estimates for small racial/ethnic subgroups. Since 2006, he has led the CMS Medicare CAHPS®
(Consumer Assessment of Health Providers and Systems) Analysis project, assessing patient
experiences for 400,000 surveyed beneficiaries annually. Since 1996, he has been RAND's lead
statistician on the AHRQ CAHPS I-III projects and currently co-leads the AHRQ CAHPS IV project.
Marc is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the first recipient of its Mid-Career
Award (Health Policy Section). He has published 300 peer-reviewed articles in a variety of
journals. He serves on the editorial boards of Health Services Research, Medical Care Research
and Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. In 2014 he
was recognised by Thomas Reuters as one of the Top 1% of Cited Scientists 2002-2012.
Dr Gary Abel is a statistician and Senior Lecturer working within Primary Care at the University
of Exeter Medical School. He has a strong interest in routine data and a methodological interest
in organisational variation. Prior to joining the Medical School he worked in the Cambridge
Centre for Health Services Research. Before this he completed an MSc in Medical Statistics at
the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine which was the start of a transition from a
previous research career in space physics.