Megan S. Schuler

Megan Schuler is an applied statistician at the RAND Corporation. Her research focuses on substance use and mental health disorders and methodologically on causal inference methods which facilitate rigorous analysis of observational health data. As a co-investigator affiliated with the RAND Opioid Policy Tools and Information Center (OPTIC), a primary focus of her current work is opioid policy research. In particular, her work seeks to develop and disseminate state of the art statistical methods for evaluating the effectiveness of state and federal opioid policies. Another central research interest is heterogeneity in substance use and mental health behaviors, disorders, and treatment, with respect to variation across age and population subgroups. Her current research focuses on substance use disparities among sexual minorities (e.g., gay, lesbian, bisexual individuals). Her ongoing work has characterized notable variation in substance use behaviors across sexual minority subgroups and identified differential risk factors and etiological pathways that contribute to these disparities. In prior work, she has used latent variable modeling to identify distinct subgroups of individuals characterized by similar behavioral health treatment utilization patterns and examined how associations between substance use and risk factors vary dynamically across age using time-varying effect modeling. Prior to RAND, Schuler was a research fellow at Harvard’s Health Care Policy Department and a postdoc at Penn State’s Methodology Center. She received her Ph.D. in psychiatric epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a M.S. in biostatistics from the Medical University of South Carolina, and a B.S. in mathematics from Tulane University.