Dr. Michael Harhay is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a core faculty member of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research (PAIR) Center, where he directs the PAIR Center Clinical Trials Methods and Outcomes Lab.

He is the author of more than 150 scientific publications and leads a research program that primarily focuses on topics related to the design and analysis of randomized trials, missing data, and statistical epidemiology. He is the primary investigator of several research projects, including grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). His funded projects focus on two separate but related areas to improve outcomes for patients with critical and serious illnesses, such as sepsis, acute respiratory failure, and other end-stage organ diseases. First, he develops statistical and causal inference methods to analyze informatively missing or censored outcomes in individually- and cluster-randomized trials.

Second, he and his team are developing patient-centered outcome measures to improve the efficiency and patient-centeredness of randomized trials. Dr. Harhay is also a principal investigator or collaborator for several national and international cohort studies seeking to develop interventions and new approaches for measuring long-term outcomes after hospitalization for critical illness. These projects increasingly include a molecular and immunological focus on the recovery from critical illness, with collaborators from Penn and the UK.

Dr. Harhay is deeply invested in mentoring and in the development of innovative approaches to teach research methods. At Penn, he has developed several new graduate courses and was awarded the Sandy Norman teaching award from the Masters of Clinical Epidemiology program in 2020. Dr. Harhay also serves on several national and international steering committees, expert panels, and Data Safety and Monitoring Boards in critical care and solid-organ transplantation. He also serves as the Statistical Editor of the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, the Editor of the International Journal of Epidemiology, and as an editorial board member of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. He was the recipient of the 2021 Early Career Achievement Award from the American Thoracic Society Assembly on Critical Care.