Alumni Career Paths

Our scholars have pursued diverse and flexible career paths both during and after completing the program. Here are profiles of selected alumni:

Elizabeth Armstrong, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University , has conducted research on the relationship between self-efficacy and health outcomes and the social construction of risk in pregnancy. This work, which she began while in the Michigan program, has resulted in a book titled Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). In 2004, she received a RWJ Investigator Award in Health Policy Research for work on “Fetal Personhood: the Raw Edge of Obstetrical Practice and Ethics.” Michael Greenstone is the 3M Associate Professor of Economics at MIT. His current research, initiated while he was in the Berkeley/UCSF program, includes a project on the association between particulates in air pollution and infant mortality rates. An article, co-authored with Ken Chay of UC Berkeley, reporting on this research received the International Health Economics Association's 2004 Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the year's best paper in health economics. Cathy Cohen, professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture 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 RWJ Investigator Award in Health Policy Research for a project entitled, “Race, Politics, and Adolescent Health: Understanding the Health Attitudes and Behaviors of African American Youth. She currently serves on the program's National Advisory Committee. Dalton Conley, professor of sociology and public policy at New York University, and director of the Center for Advanced Social Science Research, has extended his research interests in race and poverty to the areas of social and biological risks in health. Work for his third book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances , with Kate W. Strully and Neil G. Bennett ( University of California Press , 2003), was begun while he was a Scholar in the Berkeley/UCSF program. In 2005, he received the National Science Foundation's 2005 Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering. Rucker Johnson, an assistant professor in the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California , Berkeley , is continuing research begun while in the Michigan Program on health dynamics and the evolution of health inequality over the life course with particular focus on the importance of neighborhood and family background. This work grew out of his award-winning dissertation in labor economics. Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government 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 by conducting historical, formal and statistical studies of FDA drug approval, pharmaceutical markets and public attention to disease. Carpenter received a RWJ Investigator Award in Health Policy Research in 2004 for a project on “Reputation and Regulation: A Study of Pharmaceutical Policy at the FDA.” Chiquita Collins, a sociologist from the Berkeley/UCSF program, is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas , Austin , where she continues research on the extent to which racial residential segregation impacts mortality rates for African Americans and whites in urban areas. In 2004 she was one of 20 recipients of a Career Enhancement Award for Junior Faculty administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. John Cawley, an economist from the Michigan program, is continuing research initiated there 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 is an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University. Jonathan Oberlander, a political scientist from the Berkeley/UCSF program, is an associate professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he teaches health policy in the School of Medicine and the Department of Political Science and continues research on Medicare politics. He is the author of The Political Life of Medicare ( University of Chicago Press , 2003). Helen Levy, an economist and assistant research scientist in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, has expanded the research begun while in the Berkeley/UCSF program to include the financial consequences of poor health for households without health insurance and the determinants of men's and women's occupation choices.

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