Nancy Breen, PhD

Nancy Breen, PhD, is an economist and former project officer at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where she investigated how race, social class, gender, community factors, and health service diffusion — especially cancer screenings — shape cancer outcomes. She was the NCI project officer for the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), before beginning her work with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Nancy Breen was a foundational contributor to the origin of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) while she worked as a health economist for the National Cancer Institute (NCI). She served as NCI project officer to the California Health Interview Survey from 1999–2015, due to her knowledge and interest in cancer screening and reliable measures for racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups. She helped develop and improve measures, methods, and tools for analyzing access and utilization in cancer control services and cancer-related risk factors. 

“I am honored to be one of 30 people acknowledged by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research for its 30 years of outstanding data collection and reporting. Working with the California Health Interview Survey staff with the assistance of the NCI team on this outstanding project was the most engaging and rewarding project of my career," says Breen.

Throughout her career, Breen, now retired, was dedicated to improving health equity through the more accurate collection of and more relevant application of data about diverse populations. After leaving the NCI, she went to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to improve measures, methods, and data for health disparities in multiple conditions and diseases. She was part of the mutli-disciplinary team that developed the Health Disparities Calculator and developed and tested a tool to measure racial and ethnic discrimination in multicultural and multilingual population groups.