Jill D. Connors, PhD, MSW, MS

Jill Nault Connors is an assistant research professor in the department and an implementation scientist in the Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science. Over the past two decades, her career has spanned from program evaluation to research and quality improvement. Research roles have spanned from a research assistant delivering the lifestyle intervention in the original NIH-funded Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) to a co-Principal Investigator on a current 3.4 million dollar research award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. She has held leadership roles in multiple national quality improvement initiatives including RWJF’s Aligning Forces for Quality, a Healthcare Innovation Award through CMMI, and the Care Transitions Scope of Work for a Medicare QIO-QIN. In 2016, she graduated from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (Memphis, TN) with a PhD in Health Outcomes & Policy Research. Her dissertation in health services research focused on geographic variation in super-utilization and its impact on population-based rates of readmission. Following graduation, she completed the AcademyHealth Delivery System Science Fellowship program in the Geisinger Health System prior to joining Indiana University School of Medicine as research faculty. Since joining IU in 2017, she received a Pipeline-to-Proposal (P2P) engagement (pre-research) award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute that led to the development of a multi-stakeholder research collaboration and research topic currently funded by PCORI. Her passion is improving patient experience of care among under-served and under-appreciated populations.