Jeremy Bray

Biography

Dr. Jeremy Bray is the Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Economics in the Bryan School of Business and Economics at UNC Greensboro. He conducts research on the economics of health behaviors, with a primary focus on the economic evaluation of behavioral health and workplace interventions. For more than two decades he has conducted economic evaluations of screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) programs and provided policy-relevant evidence supporting their ongoing development and adoption worldwide. He served as a Co-Investigator on the economic evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded Cutting Back study, one of the first alcohol screening and brief intervention (SBI) studies in the US. As the PD and PI of the SAMHSA SBIRT Cross-site Evaluation, he led a multidisciplinary team of researchers to evaluate the implementation, costs, outcomes, and impact of SAMHSA’s SBIRT grant program. He has also conducted economic evaluations of workplace programs for over 30 years, providing evidence to policymakers and employers that has improved the health and wellbeing of the American workforce. He co-directs the UNCG Workplace Health Network, which is a NIOSH Total Worker Health Affiliate, and is the Economics Lead for the Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design and Worker Well-Being, which is a NIOSH Total Worker Health Center of Excellence. Previously, he served as PI of the Data and Methods Coordinating Center for Phase II of the NIH/CDC-funded Work, Family, and Health Network (WFHN), and served as the cross-site evaluation director for the Young Adults in the Workplace (YIW) initiative, funded by SAMHSA’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention. He was the PI on a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)-funded study on the cost-effectiveness of alcohol screening and brief intervention (SBI) delivered in an employee assistance program (EAP). His publications have been referenced thousands of times and his research has had a profound impact on public health by supporting the resource allocation decisions of federal, state, local, and workplace policymakers, both nationally and internationally.

Education

PhD, Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 2000.

MA, Applied Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 1992.

BA, Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 1989.

Recent Research & Publications

Bray, J. W., Thornburg, B. D., Gebreselassie, A. W., LaButte, C. A., Barbosa, C., & Wittenberg, E. (2023). Estimating Joint Health State Utility Algorithms Under Partial Information. Value in Health, 26(5), 742-749. PMCID: PMC10126182.

Price, J. L., Swann, C. A., & Bray, J. W. (2023). Substance use and participation in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: the role of unobserved heterogeneity. Journal of Substance Use, 28(2), 259-265.

Wittenberg, E., Labutte, C., Thornburg, B., Gebreselassie, A., Barbosa, C., & Bray, J. W. (2022). Alcohol consumption and health-related quality of life in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic: a US national survey. Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes, 6(1), 106. PMCID: PMC9550307.

Andersen, M. S., Lorenz, V., Pant, A., Bray, J. W., & Alexander, G. C. (2022). Association of opioid utilization management with prescribing and overdose. The American Journal of Managed Care, 28(2), e63–e68. https://doi.org/10.37765/ajmc.2022.88829.

Thornburg, B., Bray, J. W., & Wittenberg, E. (2022). Health Utility of Drinkers’ Family Members: A Secondary Analysis of a US Population Data Set. MDM Policy & Practice, 7(2). PCID: PMC9520150.

McCall, M. H., Wester, K. L., Bray, J. W., Hanchate, A. D., Veach, L. J., Smart, B. D., & Morris, C. W. (2022). SBIRT administered by mental health counselors for hospitalized adults with substance misuse or disordered use: Evaluating hospital utilization and costs. Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 132, 108510. PMID: 34098211

Holloway, A., Guthrie, V., Waller, G., Smith, J., Boyd, J., Mercado, S., … & Newbury-Birch, D. (2021). A two-arm parallel-group individually randomised prison pilot study of a male remand alcohol intervention for self-efficacy enhancement: the APPRAISE study protocol. BMJ Open, 11(4), e040636.

Shorter, G. W., Bray, J. W., Heather, N., Berman, A. H., Giles, E. L., Clarke, M., … & Newbury-Birch, D. (2021). The “outcome reporting in brief intervention trials: Alcohol” (ORBITAL) core outcome set: International consensus on outcomes to measure in efficacy and effectiveness trials of alcohol brief interventions. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 82(5), 638-646.

van Hasselt, M., Bollinger, C., & Bray, J.W. (2021). A Bayesian approach to account for misclassification in prevalence and trend estimation. Journal of Applied Econometrics. https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2879.

Ünsal, N., Weaver, G., Bray, J., & Bibeau, D. (2021). A Scoping Review of Economic Evaluations of Workplace Wellness Programs. Public Health Reports, 136(6), 671–684. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033354920976557.

CV/Resume