Dr. Lauren Hughes is a family physician working at the nexus of primary care, health policy and public and population health to improve the lives and well-being of vulnerable communities. She is the State Policy Director of the Farley Health Policy Center and an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado. In these roles, she leads efforts to generate and translate evidence to inform the design and implementation of evidence-based health policy at the state, national, and federal levels. She desires to change policies and systems in innovative, equitable, and sustainable ways to help marginalized communities thrive.Dr. Hughes previously served as Deputy Secretary for Health Innovation in the Pennsylvania Department of Health. In this role, she collaborated with the CMS Innovation Center (CMMI) to co-design and launch the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model, a new payment and delivery model that transitions rural hospitals from fee-for-service to multi-payer global budgets and transforms how they deliver care to better meet community health needs. Dr. Hughes is a former national president of the American Medical Student Association. She has volunteered through AmeriCorps in a federally qualified health center, worked for former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, and studied medicine and health systems in Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and Botswana. She has also been a visiting scholar at the Robert Graham Center, the ABC News Medical Unit in New York City, CMMI, and The Commonwealth Fund. In 2018, Dr. Hughes was selected by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as a Presidential Leadership Scholar. In 2021, she was appointed to the National Academy of Medicine Board on Health Care Services, and in 2022, she was elected Chair of the American Board of Family Medicine Board of Directors. Since 2023, she has co-chaired the Standing Committee on Primary Care within the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She also serves on the boards of directors of the Rural Health Redesign Center Organization and the American Medical Student Association Foundation.Dr. Hughes is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of Michigan, where she earned an MSc in health and health care research. She also holds a master's degree in health care delivery science from Dartmouth College, an MPH in health policy from The George Washington University, a medical degree from the University of Iowa, and completed residency at the University of Washington.