My research focuses on disability prevention strategies, enhancing recovery in musculoskeletal disorders, health care effectiveness, work disability in older workers, and methods to achieve safe and sustained return to work.  Research methods include health data and claims analysis, qualitative and quantitative observational studies, geospatial and multilevel analyses, and intervention studies.  Specific topics include health care for injured workers, outcomes in low back pain and other common musculoskeletal injuries, return to work in persons with health-related work disability, variations in care, and impacts of evidence-based medicine.  Most of my studies are conducted with academic collabortors in the US, Europe and Australia.

I am an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and a Visiting Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Massachusetts/Lowell.  From 1999 to 2017, I directed the Center for Disability Research at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute in Hopkinton, MA.  I co-founded the Work Disability Prevention and Integration Scientific Section of the International Congress on Occupational Health.