Shannon Brownlee, MSc, is senior vice president of the Lown Institute. She and Lown Institute president Dr. Vikas Saini are co-founders of the Right Care Alliance, a network of activist patients, clinicians, and community leaders devoted to organizing a broad-based movement for a radically better health care system. Before joining the Lown Institute, Brownlee served as acting director of the health policy program at the New America Foundation. As a senior fellow at New America, she published the groundbreaking book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which was named the best economics book of 2007 by the New York Times.

She was a senior writer at US News and World Report and Discover Magazine, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Congressional Commendation, and was named one of “four writers who changed the world” by the World Congress of Science Journalists. Her stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Times of London, Time, New Republic, Los Angeles Times, BMJ, The Lancet, and Health Affairs. Brownlee is a nationally recognized speaker, has been featured in several documentary films, and has appeared on such broadcast outlets as the ABC World News, Good Morning America, Fox News, NPR, and the Diane Rehm Show, and is quoted regularly in the press. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles in medical journals and has served on numerous scientific panels, working groups, and roundtables. From 2014-16 she was an editor of the “Less is More” section of JAMA Internal Medicine, and was a lecturer from 2011-14 at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.

She is currently a member of the boards of the Robert Graham Center of the American Academy of Family Practice and FamiliesUSA, and is a visiting scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Brownlee holds a master’s degree in marine science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.