Barbara Vickrey, MD, MPH, is Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also Associate Director of the Southwest VA Parkinson's Disease Research, Education, and Clinical Center and has been a consultant or affiliated staff for over 20 years in the Health Program at the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research institute focusing on research to inform public policy. She received an MD from Duke University and an MPH from the UCLA School of Public Health. She subsequently completed post-doctoral research fellowships in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA and as a RAND/UCLA Center for Health Policy Study fellow.

A neurologist and health services reseacher, Dr. Vickrey has created and tested innovative, collaborative care models for translating evidence about efficacious treatments for neurologic disorders into a broad range of healthcare systems and community settings. She led a multi-disciplinary team in the design and testing via a randomized controlled trial of a re-engineered model of dementia care delivery, which was found to improve quality and outcomes and was cited in Healthy People 2020 in support of national goal-setting for dementia. Ongoing research is creating, implementing, and testing Chronic Care Model-based innovations for post-stroke risk factor control and for Parkinson's disease. She co-leads an NIA-funded comparative effectiveness trial analyzing benefits and costs of alternative dementia care models in socioeconomically disadvantaged populations, to address health disparities. She developed widely-used health-related quality-of-life measures for multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. She leads one of the few neurology health services research and training programs worldwide; its focus is on reducing disparities in the quality of neurological care in disadvantaged and vulnerable populations.

Dr. Vickrey has published over 100 peer-reviewed original research papers and has received funding from federal and state agencies and from non-profit foundations. In 1998, she was awarded the Alice S. Hersh Young Investigator Award from the Association for Health Services Research (now AcademyHealth), a major national award in health services research, and in 2011 she was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.