About Me

Margaret (Maggie) L. Longacre is an associate professor in the department of public health, and is serving as the department chair. She previously held roles of MPH director and assistant dean of research in the College of Health Sciences. Dr. Longacre teaches various courses; predominantly healthcare systems and public health policy, research methods, and MPH Capstone research. In recent years, she developed and evolved the healthcare systems and public health policy courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels to include broader public health policy and health in all policies perspectives for interdisciplinary and collaborative understandings.

She was recently funded by the American Cancer Society to develop and test the feasibility of a patient-caregiver portal system to enhance patient- and family-centered care in palliative oncology. This research was conducted with colleagues at Fox Chase Cancer Center. She has contributed to several national reports on caregiving with the National Alliance for Caregiving, including on cancer and “sandwich generation” caregiving. In 2021, she launched, in collaboration with colleagues at Arcadia, YourStory.Health – a narrative inquiry project to inform human-centered health policy.  In August 2022, Dr. Longacre and colleagues at Arcadia in Human Resources led a panel on caregiving and career support in oncology for the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship. She is a member of the HERS, Women Leaders in Higher Education, Leadership Institute for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Prior to Arcadia, she was director of research at the Cancer Support Community (CSC) National Headquarters, which involved patient empowerment and participatory research and collaborations with academia and other nonprofits. She led and co-led several patient and caregiver studies, and wrote CSC’s first report on access to care in cancer. Before CSC, she was a postdoctoral fellow and senior project manager at Fox Chase Cancer Center working with Dr. Carolyn Fang in cancer prevention and control where she began studying caregiving in head and neck cancer.

An eight year caregiving experience, during college and young adulthood, for her father who had early onset Lewy body dementia and the stories of others providing care with high financial burden and low service access motivated her to pursue doctoral work in health policy for health system and long-term care change.  Also, as a former division I college student-athlete and a certified professional tennis coach with the Professional Tennis Registry, she remains actively engaged in sports, including with her two children. Her coaching experience spanned 18 years prior to Arcadia and included the development of a nonprofit community tennis club to broaden access to tennis instruction at a lower cost for youth. She grew up locally (to Arcadia) and was highly engaged in sports as her mother was a former member and captain of the U.S National Field Hockey team, 1959-1973, collegiate and high school coach, and innovator by initiating camps specifically for females in tennis, lacrosse, and field hockey over decades.