Celeste María Torio

Experts Meeting: The Home: A Complex Field

Celeste Torio is currently the Director for the Division of Priority Populations in the Office of Extramural Research, Education, and Priority Population (OEREP) at the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ). She is responsible for directing and overseeing the development and evaluation of intramural and extramural research as it relates to the health needs and healthcare of priority populations, including scientific and policy issues. She also serves as an expert resource within the Agency to assist program development of policies and programs to advance the agenda for priority populations.

She is also a Research Affiliate at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. As an affiliate, she is involved in , you will be involved in promoting integrated, multidisciplinary research focused on the major determinants of human flourishing as it relates to children’s health and healthcare.

Dr. Torio also serves as a Lecturer in the Department of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at The Catholic University of America (CUA). She has taught classes in global health and health policy, and currently teaches classes on grant research and writing, and program management, evaluation, and implementation.

Prior to her role as Director, she served as Scientific Review Officer for the Division of Scientific Review for the Healthcare Effectiveness and Outcomes Research (HEOR) in OEREP at AHRQ. As a Scientific Review Officer, she managed the scientific peer review process for grants submitted to AHRQ for funding opportunities. She assured compliance with organizational, regulatory, and policy aspects of peer review, established and implemented procedures for chartering study sections, and oriented new reviewers to the peer review processes. In addition to scientific review, she conducted health services research on healthcare costs and clinical outcomes.