Ashley Morris is a research engineer at AbbVie. She received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Health Services Research in Pharmacy with a PhD minor in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to graduate school, she received her bachelor’s in industrial engineering (2018) from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, with an emphasis on human factors and behavioral science and a minor in business administration. Ashley has research experience in human factors and cognition through her undergraduate work in aviation and graduate work in healthcare and in pharmaceutical manufacturing and operations.

Ashley brings her human-factors-engineering lens to Dr. Chui’s SAMS Lab, especially the Older Adult OTC Medication Safety project. Joining the lab after data collection, she supported data analysis for many of the project’s workstreams (cognitive task analysis lead, misuse analysis contributor, and persona analysis contributor). She continued to support the dissemination of project findings. She also contributed to the next phase of this research, where she would support the technical components of data collection (e.g., eye-tracking support), data analysis, and dissemination of findings.

Her interests overlap with the many research initiatives underway in the Chui SAMS lab. She explored the use of eye-tracking technology to understand how patients make decisions about taking their medications (prescription or over-the-counter), with a long-term goal to improve:

• Medication safety
• Medication adherence
• Health systems design

Her master’s thesis explored how older adults make decisions while selecting over-the-counter medications in the community pharmacy, to treat symptoms of minor illnesses (that do not require a doctor). This study found that older adult decision-making about over-the-counter medications is more complicated than it may seem, and there are many opportunities for intervention to improve safe over-the-counter medication use.

Awards and honors

• 2020 – Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant—funded her work to improve medication safety for Wisconsinites
• 2020–2021 – UW–Madison Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Executive Board Member—Internal Engagement Chair
• 2018 – Degree Honors Designation and Honors in Industrial Engineering from the University of Iowa—completion of an undergraduate thesis and honorable academic engagements
• 2018 – Scholar for the Iowa Center of Research for Undergraduates—allowed her to investigate medication workflow and related communication between healthcare professionals in a major hospital cardiac transplant unit
• 2017 – Ben-Tzion Karsh Challenge Award Recipient, I-PrACTISE Conference—shared decision-making design challenge for prostate cancer screening

Publications and presentations

Find a comprehensive list of Ashley’s publications on Google Scholar. Selected publications:

• Morris, A.O. (2021) [Letter to the Editor]. Cognitive Impairment Detection in Annual Wellness Visits: Is “Direct Observation” Enough? In Health Affairs. [in Production]. Doi: 10.1377/hlthaff/2020-02373
• Shah, S., Morris, A. O., Stone, J. A., & Chui, M. A. (2020, September). Older Adult Shopping Persona Types and its Impact on Over-the-Counter Medication Misuse. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Human Factors and Ergonomics in Health Care (Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 124-128). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
• Gilson, A., Stone, J., Morris, A., Brown, R., Xiong, K., Jacobson, N., … & Chui, M. A. (2019). Impact of a pilot community pharmacy system redesign on reducing over-the-counter medication misuse in older adults. medRxiv.

Connect with Ashley on Twitter, LinkedIn, and ResearchGate.