2026 | Get to Know Incoming CSHP Director Lindsay Shea

Nationally recognized scholar and Medicaid policy expert Lindsay Shea, DrPH, MS, who directs the Policy and Analytics Center at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute, has been selected as the next director of CSHP, succeeding founding director Joel Cantor. 

We caught up with Dr. Shea to learn more about her work and the experience she brings to CSHP, where she will assume the directorship on July 6th.

You’ve been a leader at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute since its founding and the Director of the Policy & Analytics Center for the last decade. What is one experience from the early days in your academic career that continues to influence your approach to person-centered, community-engaged research?

Early in my career, before I had a faculty title or a research program of my own, I was doing early-stage work on what would become the Pennsylvania Autism Census. What struck me then — and has never left me — was the gap between what the data said and what families and autistic individuals were actually living. The numbers could tell us how many people were receiving services, but they couldn't tell us whether those services were meaningful, whether people felt heard, or whether the systems meant to help them were instead creating new barriers. That tension between what administrative records capture and what people experience is something I've carried into every project since. It's why I've always tried to pair quantitative data work with community partnership — the numbers need a human frame to be useful, and the community's voice is what keeps research honest about what questions matter.

Throughout your career, you’ve mentored students, post‑docs and junior faculty. How have these experiences informed your philosophy as both an educator and a leader?

Mentoring has been one of the most clarifying experiences of my career, in part because it forces you to articulate things you otherwise do instinctively. When I work with a doctoral student on their dissertation — or support a postdoctoral fellow developing their own independent research identity — I'm reminded that good mentorship isn't about transferring your own path onto someone else. It's about helping people build the skills and confidence to pursue the questions that matter to them, even when those questions take them in directions you hadn't anticipated. Mentorship and leadership both require co-creating conditions where people can do their best work — which means being clear about expectations, being honest when something isn't working, and being genuinely invested in outcomes beyond your own. The mentorship relationships I've had, both as a mentee and a mentor, have shaped my belief that environments that make a difference for people are built on trust, intellectual generosity, and a shared commitment to impact.

Autism research has historically focused on early childhood, but your work has helped broaden attention to autistic adolescents, adults, and older adults. What prompted you to extend your work to the rest of the life course and what has this new perspective taught you? 

Early in my doctoral work, my dissertation focused on adolescents with autism transitioning to adulthood — a period that was, at the time, receiving very little research attention compared to early childhood. What I found was that we could observe cliffs in access to services and in the ages included in research too, and that, for me, it was impossible to stop at young adulthood. If we could see the cliff coming, we needed to understand what came after it — and that meant growing attention to older autistic adults, including work on dementia, menopause, and the ways that aging-related health changes intersect with autism in ways the healthcare system is not yet equipped to address. The biggest lesson this perspective has taught me is that autism doesn't diminish with age — its complexity often grows.

Your work using Medicaid claims data has positioned you as a national leader in utilizing big data to inform health policy and decision-making to better serve individuals with developmental disabilities. What first drew you to working with large and complex datasets and how have these data helped you answer new and timely questions?

My introduction to Medicaid data came from a practical problem: we needed to understand healthcare patterns for a population. Claims data offered something that surveys and clinical studies couldn't — scale, longitudinal depth, and the ability to look across states and demographic groups in ways that could genuinely inform policy. These aren't just large files of administrative records; they're a window into how systems are or aren't serving people. They let us ask questions like: Are autistic adolescents losing Medicaid coverage at the transition to adulthood? Are there differences in service access? Those aren't questions you can answer from a small clinical sample. The complexity of these datasets — the data linkages, the methodological challenges, the variation in how diagnoses are coded across states — is genuinely hard work, but it's the kind of hard work that produces findings that can inform and move policy.

What drew you to apply to be the next Director of the Center for State Health Policy? What is the one thing you hope to accomplish in your first year as the new leader?

The Center for State Health Policy sits at the place where rigorous data meets the policy decisions that shape people's lives. My own work has always been driven by a conviction that data should reduce inequity, not just describe it — and that the populations most underserved by health systems are often the ones least visible in the research that informs them. The Center's mission gives a director the platform to act on that conviction at scale, across the full range of health policy questions that states are grappling with right now: Medicaid sustainability, long-term services and supports, behavioral health, the social determinants of health, and more.

As for the first year — I would focus on understanding and building upon the Center's relationships with the state agencies and community partners who are the intended beneficiaries of its work. Research that sits on a shelf doesn't yield change. In a new leadership role, the most important early investment is in trust — understanding what partners actually need, being transparent about what the research can and can't answer, and demonstrating that the Center will show up consistently, not just when a study is ready to publish. If I can leave year one having strengthened those relationships and put in place a shared agenda with the people the Center is meant to serve, I would consider that a genuine foundation for everything else that follows.