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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program is a two-year fellowship targeted to outstanding new PhDs in economics, political science, and sociology to advance their involvement in health policy research.

In the 2012 - 2014 cohort, the program will enable up to 9 individuals to spend two years at one of three nationally prominent universities, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley (in collaboration with the University of California at San Francisco), and The University of Michigan.

Scholars Speak Video

"Being a program scholar is probably the single most helpful thing that’s happened to me in the past year in terms of advancing my career."
Christopher Bail
Scholar|Cohort 18|Sociology

Watch the SCHOLARS SPEAK Video

Featured Scholars

Michael Sauder Ph.D.
Cohort 17
Havard University
Michael holds a Ph.D. is sociology from Northwestern University and is currently on leave from the University of Iowa, where he is an associate professor in the Sociology Department. His research interests include quantification, organizational evaluation, and status. He is currently completing a project that explores the effects of public rankings on higher education. Ongoing research includes a study of how children’s hospitals use rankings, awards, and certifications to establish organizational identity and an investigation of how physician groups respond to patient experience surveys. 
Brigham Frandsen Ph.D.
Cohort 17
Harvard University
Brigham received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 2010. His research focuses on the causal effect of interventions and institutions on the distribution of individual outcomes in health care, education, and labor markets, and on developing the econometric tools to identify and estimate these effects. Some current projects include a study of the political economy of union wage setting and its effect on the distribution of earnings, and the effect of fragmentation in health care on the distribution of patient outcomes.
Ryan Moore Ph.D.
Cohort 17
University of California, Berkeley/UCSF
Ryan earned his Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard University in 2008, and is currently on leave from Washington University in St. Louis where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science.  His research focuses on the American political economy, especially subnational social policies.  Dr. Moore's current projects include contributions to research on subnational pensions, health care, and redistributive policies; he also works on causal inference methods for experimental and observational data.  As a Scholar, he is working on state institutional variation in ACA
Boris Shor Ph.D.
Cohort 18
University of California, Berkeley/UCSF
Boris holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and is currently on leave from University of Chicago, where he is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. His research focuses on ideology and political parties in American legislatures. One current project focuses on how well state legislatures and congressional delegations represent the ideological preferences of citizens at the micro and macro levels. Another seeks to find the roots of political polarization at the state level, as well as its policy consequences. He is interested in explaining the vastly different choices states make in deciding health policy.
Kurt Lavetti Ph.D.
Cohort 18
University of California, Berkeley/UCSF
Kurt received a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University in 2011.  His primary research interests are in labor and health economics, with an emphasis on physician labor supply.  His dissertation focused on the identification of compensating wage differentials, with empirical applications to the estimation of the price of occupational fatality risk and the implied value of statistical life, as well as the effects of non-compete agreements in physician labor contracts.  His other research studies the relationships between physicians’ geographic labor supply decisions and physician quality, and formulary design in the Medicare Part D market.
Graeme Boushey Ph.D.
Cohort 17
University of Michigan
Graeme received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Washington in 2007, and will be on leave from the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and State Politics.  His research focuses on public policy innovation and political decision-making in America. His book Policy Diffusion Dynamics in America (Cambridge University Press, 2010), integrates research from agenda setting and epidemiology to model factors that shape the speed and scope of public policy diffusion. As a scholar, he will explore how American state governments respond to complex health policy threats, initially focusing on state vaccination programs.
Robert Saldin Ph.D.
Cohort 17
Harvard University
Robert holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Virginia and is currently on leave from the University of Montana, where he is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department.  He is the author of War, the American State, and Politics since 1898 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and his scholarly articles have appeared in venues such as the Journal of Politics, Journal of Policy History, and Political Research Quarterly.  As a RWJF Scholar, he is using an historical institutionalist approach to study long-term care’s policy history and its place in the American welfare regime.
Alice Goffman Ph.D.
Cohort 17
University of Michigan
Alice is an urban sociologist who grew up in Philadelphia. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in that city, her dissertation provides an ethnographic account of the heavily policed ghetto that emerged as the US continues a War on Drugs and imprisons poor Black men on a massive scale. With Mitchell Duneier, Alice recently completed a history and sociology of the ghetto from early modern Europe to the present. She currently lives in Detroit, where she is studying a number of health problems facing the residents of a collapsing city.
Neale Mahoney Ph.D.
Cohort 18
Harvard University
Neale received a  Ph.D. in economics at Stanford University in 2011. He conducts research in the fields of public finance and industrial organization and has a particular interest in health insurance markets. In his dissertation, he examines the implicit health insurance households received from the ability to declare bankruptcy, the effects of supplemental Medigap insurance on overall medical utilization, and the efficiency consequences of community-rating regulations. After completing the Program, he will assume a faculty position at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Seth Freedman Ph.D.
Cohort 17
University of Michigan
Seth received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010. His research primarily focuses on the functioning of markets with information asymmetries. His dissertation studied the effects of the diffusion of neonatal intensive care units on infant treatment and health outcomes, and in other work he has examined how consumers respond to product recalls and the effects of information asymmetries in online peer-to-peer lending markets. As a scholar, he is exploring the determinants of hospital technology adoption and the organization of hospital transfer networks. After the Program, he will assume his position as an assistant professor at Indiana University's School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

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