Brian C. Quinn, a senior program officer, is the team director of the Pioneer Portfolio, which actively seeks innovative projects that catalyze fundamental breakthroughs in health and health care. Quinn praises the Pioneer Portfolio’s work as an example of the Foundation's commitment to being open to new ideas and fresh thinking. According to Quinn, “Today, we're facing huge health and health care challenges in the United States, and one way to get to the big changes we need to address these challenges is the Pioneer Portfolio’s game-changing approach to innovation.”

Quinn points to representative Pioneer Portfolio’s projects, such as:

• Archimedes Health Care Simulator (ARCHeS), a full-scale mathematical model of human physiology, diseases, behaviors, interventions and health care systems that can transform how and how fast health and health care decisions are made.
• OpenNotes, a 12-month study in which primary care physicians share with their patients the notes they record from office visits through a secure electronic medical record.
• Project ECHO, an initiative that leverages videoconferencing technology to train primary care doctors in rural and underserved areas to treat complex chronic illnesses.
• Positive Health, an innovative approach to improving health and well being that focuses on promoting "health assets,” rather than focusing on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease.

Prior to joining the Pioneer Portfolio, Quinn was the director of health policy analysis in the Research and Evaluation unit, where he developed and managed projects to bridge the research and policy worlds. Most notable among his many accomplishments in this role, Quinn helped support work that contributed to the policy debates around the design and implementation of the Affordable Care Act. He also was a program officer on the RWJF Synthesis Project, which supports researchers to synthesize complex research findings on perennial health policy questions for the policy community.

Having joined the Foundation in 2006, Quinn relishes the opportunity to use his research background to find new ways to drive social change in the cutting-edge world of Pioneer work.

Previously, Quinn was a research associate at the Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he served as an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) predoctoral fellow. Quinn also has worked as a research assistant/programmer at Mathematica Policy Research.

Quinn holds a PhD in health services and policy analysis from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Colby College in Maine. His training includes a certificate of study from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written and presented extensively on health and health care reform. Born in New Hampshire, Quinn resides in Peapack-Gladstone, N.J., with his wife, Tacy, an acquisitions editor for Pearson publishing, and their sons, Charlie and Teddy. In his leisure time, he enjoys cooking, skiing, traveling, and rooting for any Boston sports team.