Neal Halfon, MD, MPH

Director, Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities

Professor, Departments of Pediatrics, Health Sciences,
and Policy Studies

Neal Halfon, MD, MPH is director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities, and also directs the Child and Family Health Program in the UCLA School of Public Health, and the National Center for Infant and Early Childhood Health Policy.  Dr. Halfon is professor of pediatrics in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; community health sciences in the UCLA School of Public Health; and public policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs.  He is also a consultant in the Health Program at RAND.

In 2001 Dr. Halfon was named to the Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine (IOM).  He has served on numerous expert panels and advisory committees, including the IOM committee (1998-2000) commissioned by the Surgeon General to propose the leading health indicators for measuring the country’s progress with the National Healthy Peoples 2010 agenda. Dr. Halfon recently served on the congressionally mandated Committee on Children’s Health for the IOM to evaluate how children’s health should be measured in the US, for which he also contributed to the volume Children’s Health, the Nation’s Wealth (2004). In 1999 he co-chaired the Association for Health Services Research’s agenda-setting conference Improving the Quality of Health Care for Children, which generated the research agenda that was included in the legislation re-authorizing the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in 2000. From 2002 to 2004, Dr. Halfon served as co-chair of the Health Services Working Group for the planned National Children’s Study of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and Environmental Protection Agency. He also has served on the Pediatric Measurement Advisory Panel for the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA); Foundation for Accountability (FACCT) (1999-2002); Committee on Child Health Financing for the American Academy of Pediatrics (1993-1998); and on expert panels for the National Commission on Children (1991); MCHB’s Bright Futures project; Agency for Health Care Policy and Research Panel on Child Health Services Research; Bureau of Health Professions’ Panel on Primary Care; and Carnegie Commission on Early Childhood.

In 2006, Dr. Halfon was honored by the Ambulatory Pediatric Association (APA) with the APA Research Award.  This award is given each year to one pediatrician who has helped to advance pediatric knowledge through excellence in research.  Dr. Halfon’s primary research interests include the provision of developmental services to young children, access to care for low-income children, and delivery of health services to children with special health care needs — with a particular interest in abused and neglected children in the foster care system. Beginning in 1998, Dr Halfon constituted and led a collaborative team – that included representatives from the American Academy of Pediatrics, National Center for Health Statistics, Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and CDC’s National Immunization Program -- to develop, design, launch, and analyze the 2000 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSECH). The NSECH is the first national survey focused exclusively on the health, health care, and health promoting behaviors that young children in the US experience. It has already yielded 30 publications with plans to field NSECH II in 2007. 

Dr. Halfon has also published the results of research on immunizations for inner-city children, the health care needs of children in foster care, trends in chronic illnesses for children, delivery of health care services for children with asthma, and investigations of new models of health service delivery for high-risk children.  He recently co-authored and co-edited Child Rearing in America: Challenges Facing Parents with Young Children with Kathryn Taaffe McLearn and Mark A. Shuster.  In this volume Dr. Halfon and a team of experts analyze findings from recent nationwide surveys, offering new insights into parenting beliefs and practices that could help bring about more family-responsive and holistic child health and developmental services. 

Dr. Halfon’s recent conceptual work attempts to define a developmentally-focused model of health production across the life course and to understand the implications of life course health development for the delivery and financing of health care. His Life Course Health Development model has been used to inform new approaches to health promotion, disease prevention, and developmental optimization.

Dr. Halfon has also served as a domestic policy and health care advisor to former Vice President Al Gore, providing guidance in 1998 and 1999 on the development of several new initiatives focused on family-centered community building. He continues to work with former Vice President Gore on a recently launched initiative examining new approaches to health care reform in the US.

Education

MD, University of California, Davis

MPH, University of California, Berkeley 

Pediatric residency, UC San Diego and UC San Francisco

Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, UC San Francisco and Stanford