Happy Hello!

I am a PhD candidate in Harvard Business School’s Health Care Management program, advised by Professors Amy Edmondson, Ryan Buell, and Nelson Repenning (of MIT Sloan).

I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market.

I study documentation: the records, forms, and logs through which organizations render their own work legible to themselves. It is the connective tissue of coordination and, at the same time, the part of the job people most resent: indispensable and unloved. That paradox drives my research. Organizations are built on documents, yet scholarship has largely treated records as trace data for studying other things; rarely as a phenomenon worth theorizing in its own right. I ask who writes the record and under what pressure, how it gains and loses meaning for the people who author it, how organizations reconcile records, metrics, and situated judgment when the three disagree, and what changes when AI begins to do the writing for us. I work from the field — observation, interviews, and administrative data — alongside formal models of the feedback processes that documentation sets in motion.

Before HBS, I studied opioid-use policy at the FDA, held finance and operations roles at several contract research organizations, and ran the internal database system for a cybersecurity firm - the kind of information infrastructure I now study. I hold a bachelor’s in Mathematics and Economics from Emory and a master’s in Biostatistics from UNC Chapel Hill.

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Research

Working Papers

More Documented, Less Known: Formalization, Professional Judgment, and AI Generated Notes Job Market Paper
A process theory of how a mandatory shared record continues to satisfy organizational requirements, while losing its coordinative capability for the experts who author and rely on it; and how an AI scribe, introduced into the already declining record, completes its separation from expert work. Draft available upon request.

Work In Progress

How AI authorship changes provider attention and use of the EMR. Dissertation Paper 2
An econometric exploration of the changes to provider attention and use of the notes the EMR contains.

Publications

Nikhil R. Sahni, Brooke Istvan, Celia Stafford, David Cutler. Perceptions of prior authorization burden and solutions. Health Affairs Scholar, 2(9), 2024.
Celia Stafford, Wesley J. Marrero, Rebecca B. Naumann, Kristen Hassmiller Lich, Sarah Wakeman, Mohammad S. Jalali. Identifying key risk factors for premature discontinuation of opioid use disorder treatment in the United States: a predictive modeling study. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 237, 2022.
Tse Yang Lim, Erin J. Stringfellow, Celia Stafford, Catherine DiGennaro, Jack B. Homer, Wayne Wakeland, Sara L. Eggers, Reza Kazemi, Lukas Glos, Emily G. Ewing, Calvin B. Bannister, Keith Humphreys, Douglas C. Throckmorton, Mohammad S. Jalali. Modeling the evolution of the US opioid crisis for national policy development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(23), 2022.
Erin J. Stringfellow, Tse Yang Lim, Keith Humphreys, Catherine DiGennaro, Celia Stafford, Elizabeth Beaulieu, Jack Homer, Wayne Wakeland, Benjamin Bearnot, R. Kathryn McHugh, John Kelly, Lukas Glos, Sara L. Eggers, Reza Kazemi, Mohammad S. Jalali. Reducing opioid use disorder and overdose deaths in the United States: a dynamic modeling analysis. Science Advances, 8(25), 2022.
Mohammad S. Jalali, Emily Ewing, Calvin B. Bannister, Lukas Glos, Sara Eggers, Tse Yang Lim, Erin Stringfellow, Celia Stafford, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Hawre Jalal, Reza Kazemi-Tabriz. Data needs in opioid systems modeling: challenges and future directions. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 60(2), e95–e105, 2021.

Conference Presentations

Stafford, C. (presenter). When changing the cost of data creation undermines their value. INFORMS Healthcare, Raleigh, NC, 2026.
Stafford, C. (presenter). Tech burden and why well-intentioned systems become unbearable: the case of electronic health records and their cascading impact on clinicians and care quality. International System Dynamics Conference, 2024.
Stafford, C. (presenter), et al. Predictors of premature discontinuation of opioid use disorder treatment in the United States. INFORMS Healthcare (held virtually), 2021.
Stringfellow, E. (presenter), Lim, T. Y., Stafford, C., DiGennaro, C., Homer, J., Wakeland, W., Jalali, M. S. Reducing opioid use disorder and overdose in the United States: policy analysis. 39th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, Chicago, Illinois (held virtually), 2021.
Lim, T. Y. (presenter), Stringfellow, E., Stafford, C., DiGennaro, C., Homer, J., Wakeland, W., Glos, L., Kazemi-Tabriz, R., Jalali, M. S. Reducing opioid use disorder and overdose in the United States: model development and estimation. 39th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, Chicago, Illinois (held virtually), 2021.
Lim, T. Y. (presenter), Stringfellow, E., Stafford, C., DiGennaro, C., Beaulieu, E., Ewing, E., Glos, L., Kazemi-Tabriz, R., Jalali, M. S. Modeling the opioid crisis to support national policy development. 38th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, Bergen, Norway (held virtually), 2020.

Teaching

Courses

MIT Sloan 15.873, System Dynamics for Business and Policy — Teaching Assistant, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023.
MIT Sloan 15.736, Introduction to System Dynamics (Executive MBA) — Teaching Assistant, Summer 2022, Summer 2023.
Harvard Business School, Transforming Healthcare Delivery — Teaching Assistant, Spring 2022, Spring 2023.
I have also facilitated the Beer Game more than ten times with the system dynamics faculty (Nelson Repenning, John Sterman, Hazhir Rahmandad, Brad Morrison), taught widely in MIT Sloan Executive Education, and TA’d the Asia School of Business system dynamics course.

What students say

I have taught cancer medicine and blood disorders to over 15 generations of hematology/oncology fellows at Boston University and Tufts… I can unequivocally attest that Celia is in a category of her own. She is not a gifted teacher: she is a gifted person. Without a moment of doubt, she is the person I’d go back to for guidance in System Dynamics.
Student, 15.736 Introduction to System Dynamics, 2023

Celia was more than a masterful TA; she was the instructor who made system dynamics and a deeper understanding of it come alive for so many students in the class, especially me. When any tool or topic in the discipline got tricky, Celia was uniquely capable of distilling the issue into comprehensible language. Her presence was invaluable to our experience, and I know many of my classmates would not have loved system dynamics as much as we do now without her.
Student, 15.736 Introduction to System Dynamics, 2023

Celia is so patient. She took the time to understand where my gap in understanding was, then gently nudged me to piece together the right parts in the right order to get to the conclusion. She never told me an answer (I did ask), but really focused on developing my deeper understanding of system dynamics in a way that made sense to me.
Student, 15.736 Introduction to System Dynamics, 2023

Service

Organizer, Student Colloquium, System Dynamics Society — over 100 attendees in person and online, 2024.
Organizer, doctoral-program social events, Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan.

Beyond my research…

My parents have a farm with cows, goats, and bees, and some of my favorite days are the ones I spend on it. I grew up around animals and around work done by hand; I’ve never lost my fondness for either. If you have a broken drawer, light switch, or headlight, give me a call. Happy to help where I can.

I also tend to say yes, whether it be to a bike ride from Boston to Provincetown, Massachusetts (with zero prep), or a last minute road trip to experience "New England Beach Pizza" - the worst thing I have ever consumed. This has led pretty directly to my biggest passion - my community. My best friend and I host weekly picnics on Boston's Esplanade each summer that draw anywhere from five to twenty-five folks: sea floor surveyors and Patriots cheerleaders, the steward of the local laborers union, and the bar tender from my favorite music venue, doctors, lawyers, and of course fellow academics. If you're reading this, you're welcome too. Shoot me an email and come join for the next one.