Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

Michael Greenstone currently serves as chief economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave from MIT, where he is 3M Professor of Environmental Economics. His research while in the Berkeley/UCSF program included a project on the association between particulates in air pollution and infant mortality rates. An article, co-authored with Ken Chay of UC Berkeley, reported on this research and received the International Health Economics Association’s 2004 Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the year’s best paper in health economics.

Cathy Cohen, 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 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.

Dalton Conley, Dean of the Social Sciences, and University Professor and chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University, has extended his research interests in race and poverty to the areas of social and biological risks in health. Work for his 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 Alan T. Waterman Award, which recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering. His most recent book is Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms and Economic Anxiety (2009).

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 inequalities 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, 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 the FDA drug approval process, pharmaceutical markets and public attention to disease. Carpenter received a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research in 2004 for a project on "Reputation and Regulation: A Study of Pharmaceutical Policy at the FDA."

John Cawley, an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management 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.

Jonathan Oberlander, Associate Professor of Social Medicine in the School of Medicine, and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Administration in the School of 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.

Helen Levy, a research assistant professor 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. More recently, she has examined the impact of health insurance on health and the policy implications of employer health insurance mandates.
David Pellow, 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.