Laura Nolan

Laura Nolan is a senior researcher with expertise in using data from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for research, policy, and quality improvement purposes. Her focus areas include behavioral health, pregnancy, and children’s health and well-being.

Nolan leads all analytics work under Mathematica’s Medicaid and CHIP Business Information Solutions (MACBIS) contract with the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services. In this role, Nolan oversees all products and services—briefs, analyses, reports, digital products, public use files, and quality measure calculation—and provides subject matter expertise. For the MACBIS project, she led an effort to enhance Medicaid and CHIP data to enable analyses of disparities in access, quality, experience, and outcomes. She also led the annual development and publication of the congressionally mandated Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) Substance Use Disorder Data Book in 2020 and 2021.

Under a contract with the Department of Health Care Services in California, Nolan led Medicaid data acquisition and assessment for an evaluation of a Medi-Cal nutrition support program for beneficiaries with congestive heart failure. She was also the principal investigator for a project analyzing T-MSIS Analytic File data related to behavioral health, disability, and aging policy during the COVID-19 pandemic for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

Before joining Mathematica, Nolan completed a summer fellowship in data science for social good at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Her research has been published in the Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, Survey Research Methods, Social Science & Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, and Population Research and Policy Review, among other publications. Nolan holds a Ph.D. in demography and social policy from Princeton University and an M.Sc. from the Harvard School of Public Health.