BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Matthew Weed is the General Manager and Chief Academic Officer for Academic Health Associates. He leads academichealthassociates.com’s rapidly growing health professions training program development and accreditation activities. He also engages resources from our numerous partners and beyond to increase opportunities for our partner organizations while helping health professionals better understand how patients manage their health at home and work and how everyone can make the clinic and at home care more accessible for all. This part of his work is helping reduce costs and improve outcomes for patients, caregivers, health professionals and society as a whole.

Dr. Weed is a totally blind type I diabetic three time Yale graduate, including his Ph.D. in Genetics earned in 2004. He also has master’s degrees in Public Affairs and Genetics earned at Princeton and Harvard in 1995 and 1996, respectively. While an undergraduate at Yale, Dr. Weed co-created an early method for making electronic text available to the blind in 1990. The Yale Text Scanning system was three times more efficient with respect to cost and employee time in producing usable product, and its output was 10,000 times more space efficient than recording books to audio tapes which was the standard at that time. Electronic text also allowed users to search for information far more efficiently than scanning through audio tapes. He has mentored, hundreds of student caregivers, most of whom are now health professionals and scientists in more than half of US states and many countries around the world.

After post-doctoral involvement in bio ethics and medical education at Yale, he became the Interim Associate Director of the $150 million Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison which he helped launch in 2010-2012. He then became a Yale- Hastings fellow in bioethics from 2013-15, while growing his interest in accessibility, speaking, and health professions training reform. Dr. Weed helped build programs for students with disabilities at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been an accessibility consultant for numerous schools and government institutions. During his dissertation work, he was an informal adviser on embryonic stem cell and human cloning research and policy to the Acting Director of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Weed regularly gives presentations to health professions schools and healthcare systems on ways to improve accessibility to the clinic and optimize extra clinical outcomes for patients with special needs. He has spoken to audiences at the NIH, numerous medical programs including the University of Pennsylvania and Northwestern Schools of Medicine, dental schools including Tufts, the University of Minnesota and Oregon Health Sciences University, and health systems including Yale, Hudson Headwaters Health, and City Block Health. He is also working to improve health professionals’ understanding of how patients with special needs of all kinds ranging from disabilities to those with limited English proficiency and poor access to practical and social supports manage (and often struggle to manage) their lives and health challenges when at home and at work: a gap in training that costs the healthcare system hundreds of billions annually and increases stress for patients, caregivers, staff , health professionals and our society as a whole. Dr. Weed works with applicants to colleges and also with pre health and health professions students to help them with admissions processes for professional school and advanced training. In doing so he has learned a great deal about how schools recruit, support and train their students. Knowledge he puts to work on behalf of programs Academic Health Associates works with.

In his spare time, Dr. Weed reads, travels, enjoys outdoor activities, spends time with his two shelter rescue cats, and stays connected with his hundreds of past and current mentees.

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