Professor/Research Scientist
Wegmans School of Pharmacy, St John Fisher College
Jill Lavigne PhD is a health services researcher by training who has simultaneously served as a founding faculty member of the Wegmans School of Pharmacy, St John Fisher University, and as the lead scientist for new programs in both Real World Data (RWD) and Evidence (RWE) and suicide prevention in pharmacy practice at the Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). At the VA, she led the development of partnered research that led to the development of a new statistical surveillance system for rare adverse events (Harvard Data Science Review, 2019). Follow-up studies in millions of North American adults confirmed suicide prevention signals of folic acid and benztropine, including a top 10 "most-read" paper of the year in JAMA Psychiatry in 2022. Dr. Lavigne's team also conducts VA research on the effects of Vitamin D insufficiency and supplementation on COVID-19 infection and mortality. Beyond RWD, Dr. Lavigne initiated partnered VA research on suicide prevention in community pharmacy settings, including a 7-state randomized controlled trial of gatekeeper training. Beyond VA, she led the development of new curricula in population health, pharmacoeconomics and quality improvement for her new school of pharmacy. Dr. Lavigne is a board member of the New York State Medicaid Drug Utilization Review Board and an reviewer for the National Institute of Mental Health. She holds a PhD (Health Services Research) and Master of Public Health from the Univerity of Rochester and a BA in Public Policy Analysis/Chinese from Duke University.
