Rachel Grob, M.A., Ph.D, is Director of National Initiatives, and faculty at the Center for Patient Partnerships and Senior Scientist at the Department of Family Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a sociologist whose career, both inside and outside academia, has been devoted to involving patients in the discourse, policy processes and institutional arrangements that impact their health care. She has conducted research about patients’ experiences on a wide array of topics, and is qualitative research lead for the USA’s health experiences research initiative using the internationally adopted “Database of Individual Patient Experience” or “DIPEx” methodology. Rachel’s work has been supported by numerous funders including Robert Wood Johnson, Ford Foundation, and AHRQ.  She is author of multiple articles and book chapters, has written a book about experiences with newborn genetic screening (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and is co-editor of Patients as Policy Actors (Rutgers University Press, 2011).