Neal Halfon

Neal Halfon is Professor of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine and Professor of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a consultant in the Health Program at RAND. Dr. Halfon is currently Director of the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities and directs the Child and Family Health Program in the School of Public Health at UCLA. Halfon also directs the federally funded Maternal and Child Health Bureau’s National Center for Infancy and Early Childhood Health Policy Research. Dr. Halfon’s primary research interests include the provision of developmental service to young children, access to care for poor children, and delivery of health services to children with special health care needs, with particular interest in children who have been abused and neglected and are being cared for by the foster care system. He has published investigations of immunizations for inner-city children, the health care needs of children in foster care, trends in chronic illnesses for children, the delivery of health care services for children with asthma, as well as investigations of new models of health service delivery for high-risk children.

Dr. Halfon currently chairs the National Community and Academic Consortium, which is focused on moving community development activities to a new level – one that concentrates on family centered community development. He was recently co-chair of the Association for Health Services Research, research agenda setting conference, Improving the Quality of Health Care for Children. Dr. Halfon serves on the Pediatric Measurement Advisory Panel for the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA), the Foundation for Accountability (FACCT), and was recently named to the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine Board on Children, Youth and Families.

Dr. Halfon has served on expert panels for the National Commission on Children, the Maternal and Child Health Bureaus Bright Futures Project, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research Panel on Child Health Services Research, the Bureau of Health Professions Panel on Primary Care, and the Carnegie Commission on Early Childhood. Dr. Halfon received a MD from the University of California, Davis, and a MPH from the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his pediatric residency at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Halfon was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford.