Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, PhD

Dr. Tolleson-Rinehart’s primary faculty home is in the Department of Pediatrics.  Her extensive social science training and research experience helps colleagues engage in the use of new research methods, especially in survey research, qualitative methods, and policy analysis.  She has helped build the Pediatrics Department’s mentorship of residents, fellows, and junior faculty.

The vast majority of her teaching, advising, and research supervision in recent years has been with the medical students in the Health Care & Prevention track, where she serves as Associate Director. She teaches about the political system and how not just economics, but politics, shapes the system in which they will practice; she works to create a space in which they can stretch their analytical wings, scrutinizing political systems’ effects on health. 

She has been a Fellow of the UNC School of Medicine Academy of Educators since 2008 and its President in 2015-16.  Her research interests remain focused on health politics and health policy, and she helped to create the Organized Section (virtually the equivalent of a specialty society) for Health Politics and Policy Research in the American Political Science Association.  But her greatest gratification, she says, “is aiding and developing the teaching and research of students, trainees and young colleagues.”

Representative Courses

PUBH 706 Advanced Health Policy for Clinicians

PUBH 763 Policy Issues in Health Outcomes and Quality of Care

Education

PhD, Political Science, Rutgers University, 1983

MA, Political Science, Georgia State University, 1978

BS, Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1973