Michael Rip

Michael Rip is the Founding Director of the Program in Healthcare Administration (Broad College of Business), and previously the Founding Director of the Program in Public Health (College of Human Medicine). Dr. Rip was on the faculty of the Department of Community Health at the University of Cape Town Medical School, South Africa, for seven years. After obtaining his Ph.D. in spatial epidemiology and medical geography at Michigan State University (MSU) in 1991, he spent 16 years on the faculty of the Department of Epidemiology (MSU). There he developed graduate and undergraduate degree programs and courses in public health and epidemiology. He also assisted in the creation of the Department of Epidemiology in the early 1990s and was the Director of the Graduate Program until 2007. Dr. Rip’s undergraduate and postgraduate teaching interests include: critical thinking and innovation, population health, and epidemiology. Counterfeit pharmaceuticals, intelligence analysis and food fraud, bringing strategic intelligence analysis to the healthcare industry (e.g., healthcare fraud), the regionalization of healthcare programs, and achieving High Reliability in Organizations (HRO) by leveraging critical reasoning and systems thinking to minimize error/reduce harm, are some of his research interests.