Molly M. Simmons

Photo of Molly Simmons
Associate Policy Researcher
Boston Office

Education

A.B. in anthropology, Harvard University; Ph.D. in health policy and management, Johns Hopkins University

Overview

Molly M. Simmons is an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. She has methodological expertise in implementation science and qualitative methods. Her research interests and expertise include military and veterans' health and mental health, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injury (TBI), substance use disorder, homelessness, disaster recovery, and justice involvement as it relates to health. She wrote her graduate dissertation on the military and VA's Integrated Disability Evaluation System (IDES). As a fellow, she led a project investigating racial disparities in the drug treatment court system and another project focused on identifying the health care and housing needs for veterans leaving incarceration. She has continued to work with justice involved populations at RAND and currently is leading a team evaluating police responses to low-risk calls and racial and ethnic disparities in police stops for a major U.S. city. She also contributed to numerous projects related to the physical and mental well-being of veterans and service members. She worked on the Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands recovery teams, CMS projects on measure implementation, and projects addressing the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles, among others. Simmons holds a Ph.D. in health policy from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an A.B. from Harvard University. She also completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the VA Health Services Research and Development's Center for Healthcare Organization and Implementation Research/Boston University School of Public Health.

Research Focus

Publications