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Renda Soylemez Wiener, MD, MPH
Health Systems Research is proud to announce that HSR investigator Renda Soylemez Wiener, MD, MPH, received the American Thoracic Society (ATS) 2025 Behavioral Science and Health Services Research Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is given to an individual who made outstanding scientific and scholarly contributions or provided outstanding service relevant to behavioral science and health services research—and who has applied these methodologies to lung diseases, critical illness, or sleep disorders, and has made outstanding contributions to the Assembly on Behavioral Sciences and Health Services Research (BSHSR) and the ATS, as a whole.
A pulmonologist and critical care physician, health services researcher, and implementation scientist, Dr. Wiener is Associate Director of HSR’s Center for Health Optimization & Implementation Research (CHOIR) within the VA Boston Healthcare system and a Professor at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Wiener’s research focuses on the implementation of lung cancer screening, with the goal of improving quality and access. She also works toward overall improvements in patient-centeredness of care by promoting high-quality communication and shared decision-making between patients and clinicians, in addition to de-implementing low-value, potentially harmful practices. Dr. Wiener’s body of work, including more than 220 publications, is widely cited and has influenced both policy and clinical care.
Because of her expertise in the implementation of lung cancer screening, Dr. Wiener was appointed Deputy Chief Consultant of the VA National Center for Lung Cancer Screening, where she has contributed to creating the VA policy directive mandating lung cancer screening for all eligible Veterans, Veteran-facing decision aids and educational materials, and the quality metrics that VA monitors on its national dashboard of lung cancer screening uptake and adherence. She also developed and tested multiple interventions and implementation strategies to improve uptake and patient-centeredness of lung cancer screening. Along with Drs. Nichole Tanner (VA Charleston) and Tanner Caverly (VA Ann Arbor), Dr. Wiener leads a 28-site VA ORD funded trial to evaluate the effectiveness and implementation of precision approaches to lung cancer screening – a study expected to influence national guidelines for lung cancer screening.
