CHP/PCOR
Stanford University
117 Encina Commons
Stanford, CA 94305-6019

pwise@stanford.edu
(650) 725-5645 (voice)
(650) 723-1919 (fax)

Research Interests
children's health policy; disparities in health outcomes by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; the impact of medical technologies on disparities in healthcare treatment and outcomes

Paul Wise is the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Society at Stanford, and a core faculty member at CHP/PCOR. He is a health policy and outcomes researcher whose work has focused on children's health; health-outcomes disparities by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; the interaction of genetics and the environment as these factors influence child and maternal health; and the impact of medical technology on disparities in health outcomes.

Before coming to Stanford in July 2004, he was a professor of pediatrics at Boston University and vice-chief of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He previously served as director of emergency and primary care services at the Children's Hospital of Boston, and as director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School. He has also served as a special expert at the National Institutes of Health and as special assistant to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Antonia Novello in 1990-1991.

Wise's work has encompassed many disciplines including neonatology, genetics, epidemiology and economics. A study he helped conduct in 2002, for example, examined how genetic characteristics and maternal smoking interact to influence birth weight. Another of his studies examined how a new treatment for premature babies affected racial disparities in infant mortality.

Wise has worked to improve healthcare practices and policies in developing countries. He is involved in child health projects in India, South Africa and Latin America, targeting diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS. He also travels each year to an indigenous village in Guatemala, where he teaches and provides care at the village clinic.

He currently chairs the steering committee of the NIH's Global Network for Maternal and Child Health Research, and he has served on many other boards and committees including the Physicians' Task Force on Hunger and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Consortium on Health Disparities. He has received honors from organizations including the American Public Health Association, the March of Dimes, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

He received a BA in Latin American studies from Cornell University, an MD from Cornell University and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston. He is fluent in Spanish and conversational in French and in Cakchiquel (a Guatemalan Indian language).