PolicyLab

Danielle Cullen (she/her) is a faculty member at PolicyLab at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric emergency medicine at CHOP and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior fellow of the University of Pennsylvania Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and co-course director for Master Level Introduction to Implementation Science at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Cullen’s research focuses on socio-economic health disparities, in particular childhood food insecurity. Her long-term goal is to improve health equity among socially disadvantaged children through the development of effective, acceptable, and feasible strategies to identify social risk and improve family engagement with resources. She is dedicated to community involvement in research and programmatic design, and leveraging methods from Community-Based Participatory Research and Implementation Science to enhance reach and sustainability of developed programs. Her current interdisciplinary research portfolio includes: mixed-methods evaluations of social determinant screening modalities, locations and referral processes; a hybrid implementation-effectiveness study of the USDA’s summer food service program across five CHOP clinical settings; and a qualitative evaluation of low-income families’ experiences with a clinically-based subsidized organic produce box program. 

In addition to her research, Dr. Cullen is a member of the advisory board for the hunger pillar of CHOP’s Healthier Together initiative and CHOP’s social risk screening and resource map sponsorship board. She serves on multiple city-wide committees, including as co-chair of the food insecurity workgroup for the multi-institutional COACH (Collaborative Opportunities to Advance Community Health) initiative to address social determinants of health in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Dr. Cullen earned her Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College. She completed residency in General Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC. There, with support from the American Academy of Pediatrics, she developed a screening and intervention protocol for food insecurity in the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Emergency Department. This protocol was integrated into the electronic medical record system as the standard of care and has now been expanded to the hospital’s inpatient and outpatient settings. She completed Pediatric Emergency Medicine fellowship at CHOP while also serving as a T32 research scholar, earning her Master of Health Policy Research from the University of Pennsylvania.