Tipirneni picked for prestigious health policy fellowship

A general internal medicine physician who has devoted her career to studying how health policy decisions affect patients like hers nationwide will spend the next year advising policymakers in Washington, D.C. directly, through a prestigious national fellowship.

Renuka Tipirneni, M.D., M.Sc., an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, was selected by the National Academy of Medicine and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of eight RWJF Health Policy Fellows for 2026-2027. 

Beginning in September, she and the other fellows will immerse themselves in health policy before being placed as senior advisers to elected or appointed federal government leaders in the legislative or executive branches. 

Tipirneni, whose primary faculty appointment is in the Division of General Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, is a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. She has a joint appointment in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the U-M School of Public Health.

Since joining U-M in 2013, she has studied the impacts of changes in Medicaid and Medicare policy, and ways to optimize care for individuals with social risks and disadvantaged populations. 

Tipirneni serves as Program Director of the MSHIELD collaborative quality initiative which aims to identify and address patients’ health-related social needs across the state of Michigan, working with other CQIs also supported by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.

She’s also a co-director of the National Clinician Scholars Program at U-M, a health services and health policy research training program that’s the successor to one formerly funded by RWJF that she trained in at U-M. A graduate of Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, she trained in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Learn more about the fellowship and the other fellows selected this year.