Tara Montgomery

Tara brings a practitioner perspective to the University's research, learning, leadership development, and partnerships to improve health and health care systems. In this role, she has contributed to the new MSc in Global Health Leadership and other graduate-level and executive development courses. She also serves as a mentor and facilitator for reflection around complex challenges, helping to guide students in their self-development journeys to becoming effective change makers and leaders in health organisations and other social enterprises.

Based in New York, Tara is a trusted change leadership advisor and strategist who strives to connect the dots between healthy people and healthy democracies, bringing consumer and citizen perspectives to conversations about culture change in health care and other complex systems. Tara is driven by optimism about the power of collaboration to solve the world’s most challenging problems, having spent over two decades convening and partnering with US, UK, and international academic, cultural, scientific, and non-profit institutions and leading strategic initiatives to advance public health, education, corporate social responsibility, and social change.

In 2017, Tara founded Civic Health Partners, an independent consulting practice working with purpose-driven health and technology organisations to improve their public engagement strategies and ethics policies. Observing close-up that sustainable change can only be achieved through people, Tara integrates executive coaching methods and frameworks into her practice. She works with leaders around the world to reflect on the intersection of empathy and evidence and supports them through the development of ethical approaches to build public trust. She recently completed a research project on the role of trust in the US leadership response to Covid-19 and is applying her findings about trustworthy leadership in her coaching and advocacy work. In 2021, she helped the mentoring and coaching team at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to support physicians and managers of MSF’s global medical humanitarian activities.

Tara previously led Health Impact at the US non-profit publishing and advocacy organisation Consumer Reports, where she developed strategies for protecting the health, safety, privacy, and pocketbooks of consumers, and advocated for increasing the transparency and accountability of corporate and government entities. There, she launched the consumer campaign for Choosing Wisely, an initiative that promotes conversations about unnecessary medical tests and procedures.

Tara is a regular speaker at influential forums on consumer insights, health tech, ethics and communications. Her work on trust has appeared in JAMA, BMJ Opinion, and the AMA Journal of Ethics podcast. She has served as Co-chair of the Ethics and Compliance Advisory Board for PatientsLikeMe and as a member of the Scientific Board of the Preventing Overdiagnosis collaboration. She is currently a member of the Building Trust Patient Advisory Committee of the ABIM Foundation and a public member on the Board of Directors of the American Board of Medical Specialties, where she serves on the Ethics and Professionalism Committee.

Tara holds a BA from Kings College London and an Executive Mastère Spécialisé® in Consulting and Coaching for Change from HEC Paris in partnership with Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She is an Adjunct Lecturer in Health Communication at Tufts University School of Medicine.