MS, Operations Research
BS, Public Health, Health Behavior and Health Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
Katherine A. Hicks, MS, is an Executive Director in Health Economics at RTI-HS. Ms. Hicks' research at RTI-HS focuses on developing analytical models for representing disease progression, disease epidemiology within populations, and the application of public health and medical interventions to inform economic and resource allocation analyses. Her primary areas of research are HIV prevention and treatment, immunization, and the use of optimization to inform decision-making, but she has experience with many other disease areas and analytical methods. She has applied Markovian structures, differential and difference equations, decision trees, optimization algorithms, and discrete event simulations for conducting analyses. Her work has focused on HIV prevention and treatment, childhood and adult immunization, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, herpes zoster, hepatitis, substance abuse treatment, obesity, breast cancer detection, rheumatoid arthritis, athlete doping, and chemical terrorism preparedness to support local, state, and federal governments; nonprofit entities; and commercial organizations. She is proficient in programming in a variety of software environments. Ms. Hicks also has experience supporting multiple organizations through the review processes of health technology assessment agencies and Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, as well as helping form the Vaccine Evidence Research Outcomes Consortium, a consortium of vaccine manufacturers formed to co-fund above-brand projects aimed at improving adult immunization coverage in the United States. Before joining RTI, she managed a large-scale national study evaluating an alcohol and tobacco use prevention program. Her graduate work at the University of North Carolina focused on the application of operations research methods to health care delivery. She has published her work in the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Decision Making, Health Policy, Annals of Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, Vaccine, Health Care Management Science, Health Economics, Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, and other peer-reviewed publications.