Jill Harrison, PhD., is the Director of Research for Planetree, an international non-profit organization that provides education and training in patient-centered care for organizations across the healthcare continuum in more than 20 countries around the world.  Dr. Harrison currently serves as a principal investigator on a PCORI award to understand how Patient-Family Advisory Councils (PFACs) engage in research.  She completed her postdoctoral fellowship, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School.

Jill served as an investigator at Women and Infants hospital in Rhode Island where she worked on a collaborative project with researchers at Brown University to study advance care planning and social network support among women with metastatic cancers.  This NIH (National Institutes of Health) funded project explored the ways in which social networks of female patients with metastatic cancer influenced individual-level health care decisions and the completion of advance directives.  Her research in quality of life and healthcare services has received international funding from the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education and Road Scholar.  She received her doctorate in sociology from Virginia Tech.