The VBCSS team is excited to announce that Dr. Sarah Nowak was appointed as a Co-Director effective May 15, 2026. Dr. Nowak, the Blodwen S. Huber Early Career Green and Gold Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, is an expert in healthcare policy and health services research and has extensive experience in the evaluation of cancer screening.
Dr. Nowak holds a PhD in Biomathematics from UCLA and spent 10 years as a Physical Scientist at RAND Corporation before joining the UVM faculty in 2019. Her research has largely focused on ways to improve health outcomes and access at the population level. She has studied how patients, families, and providers make decisions about preventive care, including cancer screening, and forecasted impacts of health insurance reforms on insurance coverage and premiums. Her work has used data and models to help shape smarter policies and programs that lead to improved public health.
Dr. Nowak has expertise in a wide variety of study design types and analytic methods, including computer simulation modeling and network analysis, using data from surveys, health records, healthcare claims, and social media. Her current projects include evaluation of cancer screening utilization nationally and in Vermont specifically. She has led the linkage of VBCSS data with the Vermont statewide all-payer healthcare claims database to investigate factors contributing to the declining adherence to breast cancer screening recommendations in Vermont over the past decade.
She has received several honors for her work. In 2020, she was named the Blodwen S. Huber Early Career Green and Gold Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She also received the RAND Silver Medal Award in 2012. Earlier in her career, she earned the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. As an undergraduate at MIT, she won the Matthew J. Orloff Award for her outstanding senior thesis in physics.