Kayleigh Majercak, MS is a graduate research assistant in the Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.

Headshot of Kayleigh MajercakAbout Kayleigh:

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Kayleigh’s passion for health care stems from the experience of having her younger brother pass away with leukemia when she was 10 years old. Her initial response to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up” was a doctor that worked with terminally ill children. However, having fainted in the hospital and clinic setting, she looked into another aspect of health care, the field of pharmacy.

Kayleigh graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in pharmaceutical sciences, with a minor in business administration from The University of Toledo. She had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad to complete her practicum at the University of Szeged in Hungary. She learned first-hand how the Hungarian health system operates including pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, and clinics as well as research on campus. Not only did she acquire knowledge of the health system, but she took advantage of diving into the culture, attempting to learn the Hungarian language, and enjoying the food (especially the ice cream). Similarly, she had the opportunity to travel to Beijing, China, to teach freshman and sophomore students business and English courses for a semester. Following, Kayleigh earned her Master of Science degree in pharmaceutical evaluation and policy from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

In her previous role, Kayleigh worked as a data analytics consultant at Humana, Inc., for four years. Her work focused on Humana’s Bold Goal Communities’ initiative, launched in early 2014, with the vision of improving health for all the communities it serves by 20% by the year 2020. She was part of the core set of data scientists designing and evaluating the impact of interventions and pilots aimed at improving members’ health. She informed market leaders with population-level analytics to aid in the identification of priority health needs such as pneumonia vaccination campaigns and identification of priority populations within each market. In addition, she co-designed a cutting-edge visual application, the “Market Health Scorecard”; a tool to enable a broad audience to interact with the application to generate near real time insights on cost, utilization, condition, and quality metrics for different markets. Furthermore, through collaborations on qualitative projects with other teams, she developed an interest in qualitative research and understanding the community voice during her tenure at Humana. Through this experience, she decided to enhance her background in statistics and outcomes evaluation and continue her education and pursue a PhD in PHSR with a concentration in patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR).

Currently, Kayleigh is a PhD candidate in the Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) graduate program, working under the supervision of Dr. C. Daniel Mullins. She has been awarded the National Health Council Pre-Doctoral fellowship in Patient-Centered Value Assessment. Her dissertation focuses on co-developing a disease-agnostic survey template to fill the patient-centered evidence gap in US value assessment.

Kayleigh is a retired ultra-marathoner but hopes to return to complete her goal of finishing a 100-miler trail race in the future. In addition to her passion for trail running, she enjoys hiking, living her yoga, indoor rock climbing, crocheting, volunteering, reading (especially Brené Brown), learning about depth psychology, and scratching off items on her bucket list, such as sky diving, surfing, scuba diving, taking an intro to aerial silks course. Fun facts: Kayleigh has a green belt in taekwondo, a motorcycle license, an identical twin, a mandala elephant tattoo as a symbol of overcoming obstacles, cats (one is a “Hemingway” cat), mistaken for Taylor Swift on multiple occasions, attended culinary school for a year, and lived in eight states.

Contact Information:

Email her at kmajercak@umaryland.edu.