Mary L. Durham, PhD
Senior Investigator Emeritus
From 1995 to 2016, Dr. Durham served as director of the Center for Health Research and vice president of research for Kaiser Permanente. In addition to her leadership roles, Dr. Durham conducted her own research on workplace health and translational research.
In tandem with her distinguished health research career, Dr. Durham worked with state and federal lawmakers in crafting policy-level decisions across a wide range of topics, such as privacy, mental health law, genetics, research, and human subjects protection. She consulted with and provided expert testimony to the President’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the World Health Organization, and the Association for Health Services Research (Academy Health), among many others. In addition, as an ambassador for Kaiser Permanente, she spoke to audiences around the world about the Kaiser Permanente health care model.
Dr. Durham was a professor in the Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, and an adjunct professor in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Oklahoma in 1978, specializing in medical sociology. Before joining CHR, she was deputy director of Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound’s Center for Health Studies and on the faculty at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine, in the Department of Health Services.