Biography

Elizabeth H. Bradley, PhD has served as President of Vassar since July 2017. She is an unabashed supporter of liberal arts education and is deeply engaged with research on the performance and quality of higher education institutions in the US. With her leadership, Vassar has established partnerships in India, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom to develop models of liberal arts higher education in these settings. In addition, Vassar has collaborated with Columbia University to create a 5-year BA-MPH program and the University of Edinburgh to create a 5-year BA-MSc in Planetary Health and Sustainability. Bradley has served on the NY Governor’s Task Force on Re-Opening during the pandemic, the MidHudson Regional Economic Development Council, the Board of the American Association of Colleges & University, and the Board of Nuvance Health. Prior to becoming the President of Vassar, Bradley, a noted public health expert, was on the faculty at Yale for more than twenty years. She has directed the Health Management Program in the Yale School of Public Health and co-directed the RWJ Clinical Scholars program. While at Yale, she mentored more than 50 pre- and post-doctoral fellows and hundreds of undergraduates as Head of Branford College. The first director of Yale’s Global Health Initiative, Bradley helped to create the first Masters of Health Administration on the African continent with the Clinton Health Access Initiative and pioneered a model of scale up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Most recently, she was the Brady-Johnson Professor of Grand Strategy and Faculty Director of the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute. Bradley has published about 330 peer-reviewed papers, 35 book chapters, and has co-authored three books including The American Healthcare Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less. She is the 2018 recipient of the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bradley graduated phi beta kappa from Harvard in economics magna cum laude, earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in health economics from Yale University. Bradley is married to her husband of 37 years, John, with whom she has three adult children.