Minal Patel
Professor , University of Michigan School of Public Health
Minal R. Patel is a professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, where she completed both her PhD and MPH training. She joined the University of Michigan faculty in 2013. Patel holds leadership roles with the Institute for Healthcare Policy Innovation and Michigan and the Center for Diabetes and Translational Research.
Patel is a leading scholar focused on making healthcare more accessible and health promotion for people managing chronic diseases. Her research addresses populations experiencing unmet basic needs, financial burden, and medical debt. Patel’s work has spanned a wide range of chronic diseases and focuses on measurement and epidemiology, interventions, and large-scale evaluation of policy and programs.
Patel serves as the director of evaluation for the Collaboration for Equitable Health, a partnership between the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, and the University of Michigan School of Public Health, with support from the Bank of America Foundation. She previously served on the evaluation team for Michigan’s Medicaid Expansion.
Patel has maintained a consistently funded research program through private foundations and federal agencies and her work appears in high impact journals in public health and medicine. She was selected as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine from 2018-2021.
For over a decade, Patel has taught courses at the University of Michigan focused on addressing unequal treatment in healthcare, social and cultural aspects of health, applied health communications, and health behavior theory.