Daniel Friend

Daniel Friend’s work primarily focuses on supporting programs, from development to implementation to evaluation. Dr. Friend joined Mathematica in 2011 and brings both knowledge and expertise in research and evaluation and practitioner experience. His lived experience as a practitioner informs his deep knowledge of public health theory, specifically behavior change, and therapeutic methods.

Dr. Friend’s work spans Mathematica’s Health and Human Services divisions. In human services, he has worked on projects related to family support—namely those related to healthy relationships, parenting, and positive youth development. Currently, he leads work using predictive modeling to understand participation patterns in healthy relationship and fatherhood programs and serves as a principal investigator and quality assurance advisor for two projects using participatory research methods to improve these same services for Tribal/Indigenous and Hispanic/Latinx communities. In health, Dr. Friend has worked on a variety of mental and behavioral health projects. For example, he served as a task leader for a project for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation that was designed to implement and evaluate programs integrating physical and behavioral health.

Dr. Friend holds a Ph.D. in public health and community health sciences from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.S. in psychology from the University of Oregon. He began his career as a clinical research lab manager supporting corneal transplant research at the Lions Eye Bank of Oregon.  Following this, he was a project supervisor for the Relationship Research Institute. In this role, he oversaw the development and implementation of several programs for families with low incomes and conducted related research activities.