Meet CHEAR’s New Director: Pediatrician, Policy Expert, and Proud Lions Fan

A decade ago, after finishing a Ph.D. in health policy at Harvard University, Kao-Ping Chua took his very first faculty position at the University of Chicago.

He quickly recognized something was missing.

“It was a really good place in a lot of ways,” said Chua, who received his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis before completing his pediatrics residency at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center. “But it didn’t have the pediatric-specific mentors that I needed to succeed.”

“I ended up leaving in 2017 to join the Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Center, which I specifically targeted because it is such an amazing place for pediatric health services research. Moving to CHEAR ended up being one of the best decisions I have made for my career.”

A career that, eight years after his arrival at the University of Michigan, has positioned Chua as the new director of CHEAR, where he looks forward to supporting the careers of other CHEAR faculty. 

“As a junior faculty member, I spent a lot of time building up my own career, meeting milestones I was supposed to meet and proving that I belonged,” he said. “Now that I have had some success, I feel like it’s time for me to give back to CHEAR by supporting its faculty as much as I can.”  

“I believe that by supporting their careers and augmenting their research, I can make more of an impact on the world and for child health than I could if I just continued doing my own research.”

The mission of CHEAR – one of the largest pediatric health services research centers in the United States, with 17 investigators and more than 30 staff members – is to advance the health and well-being of all children, adolescents, and families through research and education.

Chua has made it his mission to trumpet its work and really put it on the map.

“I’d like CHEAR to be a household name, not just in the pediatric health services research world but also in the greater health services research world,” he said. “I’d like to be able to introduce myself to an adult-focused researcher at a conference and have them know that CHEAR does good research, even if they don’t know exactly what we do.” 

Chua plans to enhance CHEAR’s national visibility through better external communications, having a stronger social-media presence, and implementing a standardized process for dissemination of research to the media.

“It also means that we should really come together as a faculty and identify key core initiatives that we become known for, whether they’re new or existing initiatives,” Chua said. “It’s really important that centers have those kinds of initiatives, so they can help brand themselves.”

Chua has branded himself with research focusing on slowing the U.S. opioid epidemic, improving the affordability of healthcare, reducing the use of low-value care, and identifying emerging trends in pediatric healthcare utilization.

His studies have been published in journals such as NEJM, JAMA, BMJ, JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Pediatrics, and Pediatrics, and have been covered by national media outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and NPR.

In January 2020, Chua testified in front of Congress on behalf of a bill to close a loophole in orphan-drug policy that would have allowed a drug manufacturer to bar all new formulations of buprenorphine – an opioid addiction treatment – from the market for seven years.

The Orphan Drug Act (ODA), passed in 1983, provides incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for rare diseases.

Chua said a Health Affairs blogpost he wrote about the manufacturer’s attempts to exploit the loophole in orphan drug policy led to his invitation to testify before the U.S. Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

“I felt that it was an egregious abuse of orphan-drug policy,” Chua said. “Opioid addiction is not a rare disease, and the idea of barring new treatments from the market in the middle of a devastating opioid epidemic felt very wrong to me.

“During my testimony, a lot of the people in Congress just inherently understood how wrong the manufacturer’s actions were. Many of them came from districts that had been ravaged by the opioid epidemic, so there was a lot of bipartisan support behind the idea of closing the loophole.” 

When Chua’s not battling for the common good or making plans to build up CHEAR, he’s a family man. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, Sara, and two daughters, 10-year-old Addy and 8-year-old Rosie.

But Ann Arbor can’t hold him for too long. He’s also an enthusiastic traveler, having visited 45 states and 35 countries.

“I have a goal to travel to all 50 states, and I’m almost there,” Chua said. “Traveling is a big deal for me. It’s my number one passion.”

As for number two?

“I’m a ridiculous Detroit Lions fan,” Chua, who grew up in Michigan, said. “I was a Lions fan before any of the good stuff happened.

“Lots of pain, but lots of payoff in recent years.”