Doctoral students Janice Jhang, Jenna Rogers, Skye Yoden, and Hanxuan (Astrid) Yu are the 2026 recipients of the Raiffa Fund Award. The Fund supports the training of scholars pursuing doctoral studies in decision and risk analysis and is administered by CHDS. Following Raiffa’s model of engaged mentorship, awardees work closely with a member of the CHDS faculty or the larger Harvard community in planning and implementing projects of their own design.
Jhang will redesign assessment methods for the midterm and final exams of the Harvard Chan School course, Decision Analysis for Health and Medical Practices (RDS 280), to account for the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). Updated exams will promote responsible and transparent use of AI while measuring students’ conceptual understanding of the course materials. Jhang will be mentored by CHDS’s Ankur Pandya.
Rogers will develop a teaching plan for one in-person session for a new course on the shared decision-making behind uncertainty and ambiguity, how this influences decision-making for patients, clinicians, and policymakers, and how triads, groups, and surrogates navigate decisions under uncertainty. Rogers will be mentored by Massachusetts General Hospital’s Karen Sepucha.
Yoden will create a short course on ethics and values and how they shape discounting and equity weighting parameters in decision science models. Using an applied climate-health case study, the course will examine how utilitarian, prioritarian, and egalitarian value systems can be represented within a stylized Markov cohort model, and how these choices influence model outputs and policy recommendations. Yoden will be mentored by CHDS’s Ole Norheim, with additional advising from James Hammitt.
Yu will create educational materials on sampling distributions and how their shape affects meta-modeling accuracy in disease simulation models. The project will provide best-practice recommendations for applying metamodeling techniques to complex simulation models through a tutorial manuscript designed for instructional use and an open-access R Shiny application that enables users to upload training datasets and assess meta-model performance. Yu will be mentored by CHDS’s Zachary Ward.
The Howard Raiffa Fund was established in 1996 at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis through the generosity of donors wishing to honor Howard Raiffa, one of the true ‘founding fathers’ of decision science.
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