The question that has guided much of Ellie Adair’s career is an old one: What is the right thing to do?
For Adair, a 2018 graduate of Brown’s Master of Public Affairs program, the question doesn’t live in theory. It moves from philosophy seminar to policy meeting, from ethics textbook to hospital pricing model, from classroom conversations to the quiet calculations that shape how societies spend their money.
Today, as chief operating officer at the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), Adair helps lead an independent nonprofit that evaluates the effectiveness and value of prescription drugs. Her work sits at the intersection of economics, ethics and public policy — the same terrain she began exploring years earlier as an undergraduate studying English and philosophy at the University of Rochester.
As an undergraduate, Adair expected her future would lie in academia. A Ph.D. in English, philosophy or art history seemed like a natural next step. But she wanted to be more action-focused and realized she could explore that ancient question — what is the right thing to do — more concretely by pivoting to policy work.
In 2012, a year after graduating from the University of Rochester, Adair joined the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She led the chapter’s political action committee as executive director and policy operations manager. She was the only paid employee, and the job demanded everything at once: fundraising, organizing, media relations, policy advocacy and more.
The experience was formative. When she left, her résumé carried the kind of hands-on experience many early-career professionals spend years accumulating. After NOW, she moved into health care policy, joining the Network for Excellence in Health Innovation. All the while, she kept her sights on graduate school.
Brown first caught her eye via the work of economist Emily Oster, whose writing on evidence-based policy — particularly around family and maternity issues — had long interested her.
“I loved Emily’s lens of ‘What does the data actually say? What matters here and what doesn’t?’” said Adair.
Oster’s work sparked Adair’s interest in Brown and Watson and led her to the MPA program.
“I’m all about efficiency,” Adair said, laughing. “I’m all about getting things done. What’s the goal? How fast can we get there? So, I decided to study policy at Brown and I loved it.”
At Watson, Oster and economist John Friedman taught an intensive early-semester course that plunged students into statistics and economics.
“It was a lot,” Adair recalled. “Three hours of econ, three hours of stats.”
But the pace suited her. Watson’s structure — core analytical coursework paired with a flexible curriculum — allowed her to shape her own academic path. “It wasn’t rigid,” she said. “They were eager to let people explore what they wanted to explore.”
That openness, she said, reflects a broader ethos at Brown — one that balances structure with autonomy and trusts students to pursue their own ideas. “It feels like freedom,” she said.
After graduating from Brown, Adair joined ICER, where she remains today as chief operating officer. ICER evaluates medical treatments once they reach the market, analyzing how new therapies compare with existing options and whether their prices reflect their benefits. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration evaluates safety and efficacy, ICER examines the broader question of value.
The work may sound technical, but for Adair, it circles back to philosophy: “At the base of the work is an ethical question. How do we fairly distribute health care resources?”
To Adair, since the United States pools billions of dollars through insurance systems to pay for health care, decisions about how that money is spent — which treatments offer real benefit and at what cost — demand and deserve ethical consideration and evidence-based conversations.
Adair’s background proved an ideal fit for her leadership role at ICER. Her early career prepared her to work with stakeholders with varying interests, and Watson equipped her with the quantitative tools to understand the research that underpins ICER’s work.
Her time at Watson taught Adair to emphasize process over outcome — cultivating integrity, listening and respect as the foundation of leadership. “I always say I care about process way more than I care about outcome. If you have the right process, the outcome takes care of itself,” she said.
For a chief operating officer responsible for guiding an organization of researchers and policy experts, that philosophy has practical implications. “Leadership,” Adair said, “begins with honoring the humanity of the people involved — employees, stakeholders, everyone.”
She described this mindset using an idea popularized by leadership author Simon Sinek in the book “The Infinite Game,” which argues that successful organizations focus less on defeating competitors and more on continuously improving their mission. Adair cited the supermarket chain Wegmans as a prime example. “Wegmans approaches their business the way all winning organizations do,” she said, “They keep their eye on their mission, invest in their people, and do good work — not to beat the competition, but because it’s who they want to be.”
