Louise Davies is senior faculty of the VA Outcomes Group, at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vermont, where she also serves as chief of otolaryngology—head & neck surgery. Davies received her research training in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. She spent the 2017-2018 academic year as a Fulbright Global Scholar grantee, traveling to Japan and England to do research on thyroid cancer and gain expertise in surgical clinical trial design and implementation.
She is best known for her work to define and mitigate the problem of overdiagnosis in thyroid cancer. This work has led to her serving as a subject matter expert reviewer for the USPSTF on thyroid cancer screening, on a task force for the International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France to make recommendations about thyroid monitoring after nuclear accidents, and as an advisor to the state of North Carolina on thyroid cancer cluster evaluation.
Davies methodologic research expertise is in cancer epidemiology, cancer screening, and the use of mixed methods research approaches, particularly for research on patient experience, healthcare improvement and clinical trial design and implementation. She is the co-lead of the SQUIRE Publication Guidelines leadership team (www.squire-statement.org), and an Associate Editor for JAMA – Otolaryngology -Head & Neck Surgery.
As a faculty member at Dartmouth, Davies developed and for ten years taught the course in qualitative research methods at The Dartmouth Institute Masters Degree Program in Public Health. She also developed and taught in TDI’s hybrid degree program course on survey and qualitative research methods. She has served as research mentor to more than a dozen graduate students and junior faculty.
Davies earned a BS from the University of Vermont, her MD from the University of Washington School of Medicine, and her MS from the University of Washington School of Public Health.