William Crown
Dr. William Crown is a Distinguished Research Scientist at CISWH, where he focuses on evaluating the economic value of social work on patient outcomes and healthcare costs. He also analyzes effects of global health programs—such as PEPFAR—on health systems performance and population health outcomes.
Dr. Crown is an internationally recognized expert in real-world data analysis, focusing upon research designs and statistical methods for drawing causal inferences from transactional health care datasets such as medical claims and electronic health records. Bill began his career at the Heller School in the early 1980s focusing on the demography and health economics of aging, and taught a series of statistics courses in the Heller PhD program. He left Brandeis in the mid-1990s to lead health economics consultancies at Truven and Optum. From 2013-2020, he was Chief Scientific Officer at OptumLabs where he provided methodological guidance on a portfolio of research projects with specific focus on causal inference in database studies, simulation of health care systems, and application of operations research methods to health policy questions. From 2020-2025, he returned to Brandeis University as a Distinguished Research Scientist where he provided methodological guidance on a variety of research projects using machine learning and causal inference methods.
He has an extensive publication record of empirical comparative effectiveness studies and methodological publications in clinical and health policy journals. Dr. Crown was 2013-14 President of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). He recently co-chaired ISPOR Task Forces on applications of machine learning in health economics and outcomes research
Dr. Crown received his Doctorate degree in Regional Economic Modeling from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Master of Arts in Economics from Boston University.
