Terri Tanielian is a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her areas of interest include military and veterans health policy; military suicide; military sexual assault; psychological effects of combat, terrorism, and disasters; and public health emergency preparedness. She has led multiple studies to assess the needs of veterans and their families, including a recent study of veterans in the Detroit metropolitan area and a large prospective longitudinal study of military families across the deployment cycle. She is also conducting several studies that examine community based models for expanding mental health care for returning veterans and their families.

As the former director of the RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research, she spent a decade overseeing RAND's diverse military health research portfolio. She was the co–study director for a large, non-governmental assessment of the psychological, emotional, and cognitive consequences of deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan entitled Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. She was also the co-director for RAND's study Hidden Heroes: America's Military Caregivers, the first representative study of military caregiving in the United States.

Tanielian has published numerous peer-reviewed articles. She was a member of the planning committee for the 18th, 22nd, and 26th Annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy, which focused on mental health needs and recovery following September 11, Hurricane Katrina, and deployment of Reserve and Guard members to Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively. She also serves on the Institute of Medicine's Standing Committee on Health Threats and Resilience for the Department of Homeland Security.