Celeste Marie Torio is currently a Staff Service Fellow in the Center for Delivery, Organization & Markets (CDOM) at the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ). She leads the public reporting initiative to improve healthcare quality, lower overall cost of care, and improve decision-making for consumers.

Dr. Torio also serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Economics at The Catholic University of America (CUA), where she focuses on the economic and management aspects of global health and nutrition, as well as epidemiology.

Prior to joining AHRQ, she served as a Research and Evaluation Officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Her portfolio (which totaled $54.0 million) focused on identifying promising methodological advances based on emerging evidence, on state-level evaluations of policy research, and on reporting and dissemination of findings. Her work has appeared in ABC News, the Huffington Post, and Scientific American.
She also served as a Congressional Policy Fellow for the Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP).

As a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, her areas of research included the intersection of epidemiology and health policy to address health disparities. She was awarded the National Cancer Institute’s National Research Service Award and a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health student award for Outstanding Doctoral Student in Cancer Prevention. She received a BA in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, an MPH from the Yale School of Public Health, and a PhD in Health, Behavior and Society from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Teaching a course with an eye toward innovative solutions is not only challenging, but exhilarating because I realize that I am teaching students (who exhibit a passion to change the world for the better) how to use methodologies in the context of advancing human dignity and the common good.”– Celeste Torio