Grant Rigney

Which is harder: health care reform or brain surgery? Grant Rigney is going to help us find out.

Grant Rigney and Stevie Wonder have something in common: they both spent their childhoods as musical performers. Grant played the mandolin and the fiddle. Alongside his brother and his parents, who formed a professional bluegrass band, Grant performed at more than 60 shows a year across Tennessee and around the country.

For Grant and his family, bluegrass music was no mere hobby. The Rigneys released four albums, reached the top 10 on national airplay charts, and were asked to play at the International Bluegrass Music Awards Show. Grant himself was named Tennessee and Alabama state fiddling champion, and was selected as one of the best youth musicians of the 2010s.

Glorious though it might sound, what impacted Grant the most about this experience was his exposure to the challenges faced by rural Americans. “Many of the people in rural southeast America that like bluegrass have experienced poverty,” Grant observes. “Playing at the same places a couple of times a year, for five or six years, allowed me to get to know them and understand what was going on in their lives. It opened my eyes. What particularly interested me were the problems surrounding health care, and how fragmented the system is. It really doesn’t work for people who are poor, or those who are not close to health resources.”

In 2015, Grant became a Certified Nurse’s Assistant, and, with visions of medical school in the future, began studying Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee. He became the Editor-in-Chief of Pursuit, the university’s undergraduate research journal, where he came to appreciate how often prestigious journals publish studies whose findings can’t be reproduced by others. “Having to evaluate the quality and accuracy of arguments made in the articles submitted for publication in Pursuit ultimately helped me understand how easy it can be to use numbers and statistics to mislead others. It’s not always easy to measure things accurately when you’re dealing with complex systems like health care.”

In 2019, Grant was named a Rhodes Scholar, and went to Oriel College, Oxford, where he continued his love of aviation, joining the Oxford University Gliding Team. He also obtained two Masters’ degrees: one in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, and one in Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience. It was during this time that Grant discovered a connection between his two academic passions — neurosurgery and health policy — particularly as it pertained to veterans’ health reform. “Traumatic brain injury is one of the most common injuries veterans experience,” Grant notes.

Grant has published over a dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications. He continues to pursue his clinical research interests as a medical student at Harvard.

In 2023, Grant joined FREOPP as a Visiting Fellow, where his fluency with academic literature informs our health reform work across all domains. You might assume that an aspiring neurosurgeon wouldn’t have a lot of spare time to do think tank work, but Grant begs to differ.

“You have to be involved in public policy if you want to be the best possible advocate for your patients,” says Grant. “I’m excited to be a part of FREOPP because I believe we’re asking the right questions and making real progress towards finding answers, all in the name of improving the well-being of those who are struggling the most. The people at FREOPP excite me, too,” he adds. “They’re all kind, humble, and hard-working people who want to help others, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.”

Grant lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Julia.