Gary L. Freed, MD, MPH

Dr. Freed is the Percy and Mary Murphy professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and professor of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  He currently serves as Associate Chair for Government Relations in the Department of Pediatrics and as Director of Research in the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion at the Michigan Medical School.

From 1998-2013, Dr. Freed served as director of the Division of General Pediatrics and founding director of the Child Health Evaluation and Research Center. From 2013-2016, Dr. Freed divided his time between the University of Michigan and the University of Melbourne (Australia) where he served as director of the Australian Health Workforce Institute, professor of Population Health, and as visiting scholar in Health Care Policy at the Royal Children's Hospital. During that time he founded the first Program in Pediatric Health Services Research in Australia.  In 2016 Dr. Freed returned full time to the University of Michigan to continue his research in health policy and economic issues focused on children.

Dr. Freed has more than 30 years of experience in children's health services research. He has been the principal investigator of numerous federal, state and foundation-funded grants, and of the first pediatric health services research fellowship program funded by the National Institutes of Health. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles on child health policy and health economics, immunizations, physician behavior, the medical workforce and inter-specialty variation in the provision of preventive services to children.

Dr. Freed received his bachelor's degree from The University of Texas at Austin, his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and his Master of Public Health degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH, Dr. Freed was a Robert Wood Johnson clinical scholar as well as a preventive medicine fellow.

He is a past president of the Society for Pediatric Research, the largest research society in the field of child health. SPR awarded him its 2009 Douglas K. Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award for Perinatal and Pediatric Health Care Research.  He has also received the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award from Baylor College of Medicine and the 2019 Academy Health Pediatric Section Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Freed serves on several national and international committees regarding child health. He currently serves as the President of the International Pediatric Research Foundation and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar to the Netherlands in 2021-2022.  He is past chair of the Department of Health and Human Services National Vaccine Advisory Committee. He is a frequent consultant to state and federal agencies as well as to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and to the World Health Organization. He is a member of the American Board of Pediatrics and a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The current focus of his research is child health equity. In 2023, he launched two new Programs for which he serves as Director: the Program for Equity in Adolescent and Child Health (PEACH) and the Michigan Child Health Equity Collaborative (MI-CHEC). PEACH is supported by 10 clinical departments in the School of Medicine, Mott Hospital, the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion, Poverty Solutions, and several other units at the University of Michigan. MI-CHEC is a quality collaborative of the three largest pediatric health systems in Michigan, funded by the State of Michigan Medicaid Program.