Life After the Program
, David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and Deputy Provost for Graduate Education at the University of Chicago, was a scholar in the former program at Yale University, where she continued research begun in graduate school on the political response to AIDS in African-American communities. In 2005 she received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research for a project, “Race, Politics, and Adolescent Health: Understanding the Health Attitudes and Behaviors of African-American Youth.” She recently completed serving a term on the program’s national advisory committee.
, a professor in the Departments of Policy Analysis and Management and Economics at Cornell University, is continuing research initiated at the Michigan program on the economics of obesity, including the effect of body weight on labor market outcomes and on adolescent behavior. He received the 2005 John D. Thompson Prize for Young Investigators from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration for his contributions to the research literature in the field of health economics and the economics of obesity. Cawley also has served on national academic commissions related to the prevention of obesity, convened by the Institute of Medicine, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
a senior fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute, provides expertise in provider payment and competition, the organization and delivery of care, and their impacts on access, cost, and quality. Her current research focuses on the implementation of national and state health policy reforms, particularly as they relate to patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs), accountable care organizations (ACOs), and related provider payment changes. A former scholar at the Berkeley/UCSF program, Devers was an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and held positions at the Center for Studying Health System Change and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) prior to joining the Urban Institute. In 2006, she was a co-recipient of AcademyHealth’s HSR Impact Award.
, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, is continuing research begun while he was in the Michigan program in complex administrative organizations that operate in the health policy domain. He is conducting historical, formal and statistical studies of FDA drug approval, pharmaceutical markets and public attention to disease. Carpenter received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research in 2004 for a project on “Reputation and Regulation: A Study of Pharmaceutical Policy at the FDA,” which recently was published as a book, Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton University Press, 2010).
, an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Economics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, participated in the Michigan program. He currently works on numerous policy-related topics in labor economics and health economics, including public smoking bans, employer-provided health insurance, and minimum wage legislation. His work has been published in the Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Public Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics, among other outlets. Adams served as a Senior Economist for education, labor and welfare with the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers under both Presidents Bush and Obama.
, a professor and Don A. Martindale Endowed Chair of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, has broadened his research on work, race and health, initiated while in the Berkeley/UCSF program, to include issues of environmental justice and social and health inequalities. Pellow has received several awards for his research publications. In 2010, he began serving a term on the program’s national advisory committee.
, a professor of social medicine in the School of Medicine, and a professor of health policy and management in the School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaches health policy in the School of Medicine and the Department of Political Science. He continues research on Medicare politics, which he began in graduate school and expanded while in the Berkeley/UCSF program. Oberlander is the author of The Political Life of Medicare (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation during the 2008-2009 academic year. Recently, he authored a series of commentaries on the politics of health reform in the New England Journal of Medicine.
, an associate professor of economics in the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, conducted research on the effects of local labor markets on health insurance coverage for children while she was in the Michigan program. More recently, she has examined such issues as the earned income tax credit and fertility, workforce needs to care for the nation’s aging population, and the differential impacts of public health insurance expansions at the local level. She spent the 2009-2010 academic year serving as a Visiting Fellow in the Congressional Budget Office in Washington, D.C.
, an associate professor of sociology and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, conducted research on racial disparities in mortality and on labeling bias in heart disease deaths while a scholar in the Michigan program. His current research focuses broadly on the social processes that create inequalities in socioeconomic status, health and mortality in the US and Africa. Since 2008, he has served as a program ambassador for the RWJF Scholars in Health Policy Research Program.
is the Helen Ross Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and faculty chair of the Center for Health Administration Studies at the University of Chicago. He has expanded his research on birth outcomes and maternal health initiated while in the former Yale program, to include issues of substance abuse, HIV/AIDS prevention and child and infant health. Pollack has authored numerous op-eds and essays in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, American Prospect and New Republic.
, an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, is continuing work that she began while in the Harvard program on inequalities in access to health care, quality of care, and health outcomes. Her current research concerns the politics of inequality, social policy, and the economy in advanced industrialized democracies. In 2006, she received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Researchfor a project, “What’s Fair in Healthcare: Thinking with Americans about Health and Health Care Inequalities.”
, a senior economist in the Center for Delivery, Organization and Markets (CDOM) within the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), has for several yearscontinued work on economic modeling of health care organizations that he initiated while in the Michigan program. His current research includes the economics of medical errors, malpractice tort reform, the debt and asset holdings of the uninsured, the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising on drug prices, and bariatric surgery for the obese. In 2007, he received the AHRQ Director’s Award for Excellence and, in 2009, received the John M. Eisenberg Article-of-the-Year Award in health services research from AcademyHealth for "The Impact of Medical Errors on 90-Day Costs and Outcomes."
Alumni Speak Video
"The two greatest challenges facing our health system today are cost and equity. My participation in the Program has really affected both my view of what the challenges are but also my understanding of what the opportunities are that we have to fix them."
Hahrie Han
Alumni|Cohort 16| Political Science
