Matthew Chinman, PhD

  • Senior Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corporation
  • Career Health Scientist, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System
  • Professor of Medicine

Dr. Matthew Chinman is a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the Senior Implementation Scientist at the Pittsburgh Dissemination and Implementation Science Collaborative and a member of the Center for  Research of Health Care. He is also a Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation, where his focus has been on developing strategies to enhance the prevention capacity of community-based prevention practitioners. He codeveloped the Getting to Outcomes (GTO) model and led the development and testing of several GTO-based guides that are aimed at assisting local communities in planning, implementing, and evaluating prevention programs in the areas of sexual assault prevention in the military, substance abuse prevention, underage drinking prevention, teen pregnancy prevention, homelessness, and youth development.

With an overall focus on developing and testing various interventions to improve the recovery of individuals with serious mental illnesses, Dr. Chinman is also a career health scientist at the VISN 4 Mental Illness, Research, Education, and Clinical Center (MIRECC) and at the Center for Health Equity Research and Equity Promotion (CHERP), both at the Pittsburgh VA Medical Center. As part of that initiative, he has been developing and accessing strategies that involve mental health consumers in service-providing roles to improve the quality of their care. Published in more than 140 scientific articles, Dr. Chinman is the 2020 recipient of the VA Daniel Deykin Award for Outstanding Mentor, Department of Veteran Affairs. 

Education & Training

  • BA (Psychology), Emory University
  • PhD (Clinical/Community Psychology), University of South Carolina

Representative Publications

Chinman M, Woodward EN, Curran GM, Hausmann LRM. Harnessing implementation science to increase the impact of health equity research. Medical Care. 2017, 55.

Chinman M, McInnis K, Eisen S, Ellison M, Farkas M, Armstrong M, Resnick S. Establishing a research agenda for understanding the role and impact of mental health peer specialists. Psychiatric Services. 2017, 68(9).

Chinman M, Oberman R, Hanusa B, Cohen A, Salyers M, Twamley E, Young A. A cluster randomized trial of adding Peer Specialists to intensive case management teams in the Veterans Health Administration. Journal of Behavioral Health Services Research. 2015, 42.

Chinman M, George P, Dougherty RH, Daniels AS, Shoma Ghose S, Swift A, Delphin-Rittmon ME. Peer support services for individuals with serious mental illnesses: Assessing the evidence. Psychiatric Services. 2014, 65.

Research Interests

  • Implementation science
  • Adolescents
  • Health care program evaluation
  • Mental health and illness
  • Substance use disorders