Ulrike Muench, PhD, MSN, RN

Faculty
Healthforce Center at UCSF
Photo of Dr. Ulrike Muench

Dr. Ulrike Muench is faculty at Healthforce Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Her primary appointment is as associate professor in the UCSF School of Nursing's Social and Behavioral Sciences, and she is affiliated faculty at the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. Dr. Muench is a nurse practitioner and health services researcher. 

Dr. Muench’s research interests include the health care workforce, opioid prescribing patterns, and quantitative methods. She has expertise working with large Medicare administrative claims data and numerous large survey data, including the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) and American Community Survey. Her research has been published in leading health care journals, including JAMA, NEJM, and Health Affairs. In 2022 she is investigating pain and opioid prescribing patterns in Medicare beneficiaries with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Dr. Muench strives to make the classroom a welcoming place for all students, combining a belief that education should be transformative with an appreciation that many students face unique hurdles in pursuing their educational goals. She enjoys providing students with methodological tools to develop and reshape policy interventions or to conduct research for advancing the social sciences. She also mentors doctoral and master's students in health policy and nursing. As program director, she provides cohort advising on a quarterly basis for first- and second-year doctoral students.

Before joining UCSF, Dr. Muench worked as a registered nurse, research assistant, and teaching fellow at Yale University, and as a postdoctoral scholar at Vanderbilt University. In the past, she has conducted research on long-term care, opioid prescribing patterns in primary care, and the oral health workforce. 

Dr. Muench trained as a nurse in the UK and obtained her master's and doctorate in health policy and health care systems from Yale University. She did her postdoctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University. 

See Ulrike Muench's UCSF profile and Google Scholar profile.

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