Dr. Carley Riley
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
Carley Riley, MD, MPP, MHS (she/her) is, at her core, a systems thinker and actor. In the intensive care unit, this means leading complex teams through uncertainty to achieve the best possible outcomes for every patient as a whole person. In the community, it means understanding how interconnected systems produce the conditions in which children and families either flourish or don't — and acting upon leverage points to transform them.
Dr. Riley is Associate Professor in Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an Attending Physician in Critical Care at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, where she also serves as Executive Director of Population Flourishing & Regional Systems, Co-Executive Director of Community Flourishing for the Michael Fisher Child Health Equity Center, and Director of the Mayerson Child Well-being Initiative.
Dr. Riley co-leads the Collective Well-being and Equity Learning Lab and serves as both Chief Flourishing Officer and Greater Cincinnati Site Lead for Investing in Flourishing, an initiative catalyzed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Yale (2013–2015), she is currently a Fellow with The Nova Institute for Health and the Executive Leadership in Health Care Program at Drexel University.
Her work is grounded in the conviction that flourishing — for every person and every community — is not an aspiration but an expectation. She builds deep collaborations across healthcare, education, social services, business, philanthropy, law, and civic life to collectively transform the mindsets and structures that shape well-being for people and places. Her methods draw on participatory research, systems science, and outcomes-based financing — and throughout, she centers the voices and power of the people and communities most affected by the systems she works to improve.
Dr. Riley lives in Cincinnati with her partner, three children, and three dogs.