Elissa R Weitzman | Associate Professor, Director of Research
Boston Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School

Dr. Elissa Weitzman, ScD, MSc, is an internationally recognized social and behavioral scientist who has made significant contributions to understanding and ameliorating problems related to adolescent substance use and chronic illness. She is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Director of Research for the Division of Addiction Medicine (DADM) at Boston Children’s Hospital where is also Associate Scientist in the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine, faculty in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) and the Population and Development Studies Center at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Drawing from epidemiology, medical sociology, public health in psychiatry, informatics, and ethics, she has authored more than 150 scientific papers, numerous book chapters, and opened new areas of research about substance use among medically vulnerable youth, the intersection of pain, medical opioid exposure, and risk for opioid use disorder and overdose, and acceptability of novel vaccine technologies to protect against overdose. Her research extends to pioneering the integration of digital health tools and platforms into health surveillance, evaluation of quality and safety of these tools, understanding acceptability to patients and citizens of digital and computational approaches to advancing health research and risk assessment, and willingness to engage in precision prevention efforts that involve returning individual and aggregate research results about genotypic and phenotypic risks for substance use disorder. She leads the quality improvement program for the DADM, where she is innovating approaches for ensuring attention to the “whole child”.