Mary Lou Breslin is a senior analyst/researcher with the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), a leading national disability rights law and policy center. She focuses on policies affecting equitable access to healthcare, long-term services and supports, and affordable, accessible housing for people with disabilities. Ms. Breslin also speaks on barriers to housing for disabled people and disability and healthcare for public health and professional medical education programs.

Her recent research partners include the Community Living Policy Center, University of California San Francisco and Brandeis University and Syracuse University School of Social Work. Research topics include housing models that foster affordability and accessibility, accessibility of health care services, models for emergency home and community-based services, adapting nursing scope of practice rules to foster community integration for people with disabilities, and the effects of COVID-19 on the direct care workforce.

She has co-authored articles for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Health Equity, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Disability and Health Journal, and the National Council on Disability. 

Ms. Breslin received DREDF’s Edward. M. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. She accepted the 2015 Eunice Kennedy Shriver Award from the University of California, San Francisco, acknowledging DREDF’s advocacy on behalf of people with developmental disabilities and the 2009 community leadership award from the San Francisco Foundation. She also received the prestigious Henry B. Betts award in 2002 for improving the lives of people with disabilities. The Physical and Mental Disability Rights Committee of the American Bar Association awarded Ms. Breslin and DREDF the Paul A. Hearne Award in 2000.