Wayne Ray, Ph.D.

Wayne Ray, Ph.D., is a Professor of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. His undergraduate work was in Mathematics at the University of Washington  (1971) and he has a master’s degree in biostatistics (1974) and Computer Science (1981), both from Vanderbilt.  He founded the Vanderbilt Master of Public Health program.  He has been a Fellow of the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology and is the winner of Vanderbilt awards for innovative teaching (2004) and translational research (2015).

Dr. Ray has had a long-standing research interest in population-based studies of therapeutic interventions and has published 200 studies that use observational methods to assess safety and efficacy or seek to define and improve suboptimal use of therapeutic interventions.  Dr. Ray pioneered the methodology for using large automated databases, particularly Medicaid, for these types of studies.  His work includes fundamental studies of psychotropic drugs and injuries, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and upper gastrointestinal disease, NSAIDs/coxibs and the risk of coronary heart disease, and a variety of medications and the risk of sudden cardiac death.