Former CHW Visitors and Postdocs

Susan Clampet-Lundquist (2004 to 2006). Susan came to CHW in 2004 after having completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003 and serving, in 2003-04, as a post-doctoral fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting researcher in the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton. Her dissertation entitled "Hope or Harm?: Deconcentration and the Welfare of Families in Public Housing" analyzed the experience of single mothers in North Philadelphia.

Lawrence Berger (2002 to 2004). Lawrence received his Ph.D. from the School of Social Work at Columbia University in March 2002, and his research focused on the determinants of child maltreatment. While at Princeton, he spent part of his time working with Professor Christina Paxson on a research study titled "Economic Status, Public Policy and Child Neglect," which is affiliated with the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study.

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn (2002-2003). Jeanne came to CHW as a nationally recognized leader in the field of child development. At the of her visit, Dr. Brooks-Gunn she was the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, the first director of the Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, and Co-Director of the Institute for Child and Family Policy at Columbia University. In addition, she had directed the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. Dr. Brooks-Gunn has written over 325 published articles and 14 books, and has won numerous awards for her research. She specializes in policy-oriented research focusing on family and community influences upon the development of children and youth.

Marcia Castro was a research associate with CHW from 2002 to 2004. She received her Ph.D. in Demography from Princeton University in July 2002, and her research focused on the interrelationships between human migration, ecological transformation and malaria transmission on the Amazon frontier. During her tenure at CHW, Dr. Castro worked with Professor Burton Singer on the interplay between socioeconomic transformation, ecology, and health on the Amazon frontier.

Janet Currie was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2002-2003 academic year. At the time of her visit, she was a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her recent work focuses on the effects of anti-poverty programs on children. In particular, she has studied the Head Start program (an enriched preschool for poor children), and Medicaid (health insurance for low income women and children) and the effects of food and nutrition programs serving children.

Professor Currie completed several papers. In work comparing the effects of food insecurity to the effect of poverty, she shows that poverty is a better predictor of nutritional outcomes for young children. Work examining the School Breakfast Program and the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children showed both of these programs to be effective in improving child nutrition.

Professor Currie also extended her research on infant health and child health. One paper examines the effects of requiring pregnant enrollees to join managed care organizations (it had negative effects on infant health). A second investigates the effects of air quality on infant mortality in California (higher levels of carbon monoxide contributed to infant deaths). A third investigates the impact of Attention-Deficit Hyper Activity disorder on children in the U.S. and Canada and finds evidence of large persistant negative effects on a range of outcomes regardless of socio-economic status.

During her visit, Currie began working with Prof. Adriana Lleras-Muney on a project that will examine the impact of military schools on black-white differences in educational attainment, and also completed a paper for the forthcoming CHW-edited issue of the Future of Children on black-white differences in health and their relationship to the test score gap.

Finally, Currie is under contract with Princeton University Press to complete a book entitled "Saving the Invisible Safety Net" which she began during her stay at CHW.

Esther Duflo was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2001-2002 academic year. At the time of her visit, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include development economics and human resources in developing countries. During her visit, Professor Duflo studied the relationship between women’s empowerment, public goods provision, and investments in the health and education of children.

Christine Eibner was a visiting research associate at CHW during the 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 academic years. While at CHW, she continued her work on economic status and health. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland. Her thesis research was on income, relative deprivation, and mortality.

Helen Epstein is an independent consultant and writer specializing in public health in developing countries. She has conducted research on reproductive health and AIDS in Africa for such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council and Human Rights Watch, and her articles have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Granta Magazine and many other publications. Her research interests include the right to health care in developing countries and the relationship between poverty and health in industrialized countries. She obtained a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cambridge University in 1991 and an MSc in public health from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1996.

Angela Fertig was a Research Associate at CHW and the Office of Population Research from 2002 to 2004. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University. Her research interests include intergenerational earnings mobility, family structure, child health, and child support.

Erica Field is an economist specializing in the fields of development, labor and economic demography. She completed her Ph.D in economics in 2003 from Princeton and is presently an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Harvard and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She was previously a post-doctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research program at Harvard. Her past research focused on urban property reform in developing countries, including various dimensions of the household welfare effects of urban land titling programs and the relationship between property rights and collective action in urban and rural Peru. She has also studied the effect of educational debt burden on career choice and the welfare consequences of adolescent marriage in Bangladesh. Field is currently examining the relationship between microfinance contract design and micro-enterprise growth in India, and the impact of fetal iodine deficiency on schooling outcomes in Tanzania.

David Fisman visited CHW during the 2005-06 academic year while on leave from his position as Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Medicine at Drexel University School of Public Health and College of Medicine in Philadelphia. Dr. Fisman is a physician specializing in clinical infectious diseases, and a clinical epidemiologist. He completed training in health policy at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis before serving (from 2001 to 2003) as Associate Medical Officer of Health for the city of Hamilton, Ontario, ( Canada) and as Medical Director of the Hamilton Sexually Transmitted Diseases Clinic. While at the Center for Health and Wellbeing, Dr. Fisman will be pursuing two lines of inquiry. The first relates to better definition of the impact of acute environmental effects on the occurrence of seasonally-occurring infectious diseases, including several types of pneumonia, bacterial meningitis, and diarrheal disease. In addition, he will be developing novel approaches to assessment of cost-effectiveness of disease control programs that target infectious disease occurrence (e.g., vaccine programs). Because traditional approaches to the assessment of cost-effectiveness in health and medicine disregard the fundamental transmissibility of infectious diseases, they often fail to identify the value associated with such effects as "herd immunity" (i.e., the vaccination of sufficient numbers of individuals to make epidemics impossible). Better description of the true economic benefits of such programs, and of the costs associated with their elimination, will provide policy-makers with more accurate information on which to base decisions that impact population health.

Laura Frost joined CHW during the 2005-06 academic year as a member of the research staff and WWS lecturer in Public & International Affairs. She holds a Doctor of Science and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health, and an MALD from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University. Laura has been an independent consultant in global health policy for organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the International Trachoma Initiative. She also was a lecturer and Irish Government Health Research Board post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology & Public Health at the National University of Ireland, Cork, where she conducted a three year study on the perceptions, practices, and policies of infant feeding in Ireland. Previously, she worked for non-governmental organizations in eastern and southern Africa.

Laura’s current research is based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis, and focuses on global health public-private partnerships and access to health technologies in developing countries for HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, trachoma, onchocerciasis, and malaria. At CHW, Laura continued her work in these research areas and also helped manage Princeton AIDS Initiative activities.

Thomas Getzen was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2001-2002 academic year. At the time of his visit, he was the Professor and Director of a graduate program in Health Care Finance at Temple University’s School of Business and Management and the founding director of the International Health Economics Association. His interests are in the health care work force, changing mortality differentials by age groups, and health care finance. Professor Getzen served on the editorial boards of Health Economics and Journal of Health Administration Education and published articles on the forecasting of health expenditures, aging and long-term care financing, labor force trends, and national health.

Kerry Griffin was a policy fellow at CHW and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from 2005 to 2007. A graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 2005, Kerry earned her masters in public affairs and a certificate in health and health policy. Prior to her studies, Kerry worked as a research assistant for both CHW and the Research Program in Development Studies, primarily assisting with research in South Africa seeking connections between income and health status. Kerry has also worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP in Manhattan, and has held internship positions at the National Womens Health Resource Center and at Johnson & Johnson Corporate Contributions.

Thomas Hertz was a research associate at CHW during the 2001-2002 academic year. His research focuses on education, poverty and health in developing countries. During his visit, Dr. Hertz was involved in South African research underway at CHW and the Research Program in Development Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the spring of 2001.

Barbara Heyns visited CHW and the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing during the 2005-06 academic year. She is Professor of Sociology at New York University, where she has taught since 1980. She has a MA and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and has also taught at Harvard University and at the University of California at Berkeley. She has held Visiting Appointments at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Bremen University in Germany, the University of Warsaw in Poland, and at the European University Institute in Florence. As the founding Director of the Center for Applied Social Science Research, she held numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Education, and numerous foundations. Between 1989 and 1992, she was a Senior Fulbright Fellow in Poland, and served as a CIES policy liaison for higher education in transitional countries. She published numerous articles on the market transition and on educational reform internationally. The bulk of her research focuses on education and social policy. She is a co-author of Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America with Christopher Jencks et al. Her book, Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling, demonstrates that about 80% of the achievement gap attributed to race and family income levels accumulate during the summer months, when schools are closed. Learning is a non-linear process; schools promote both individual growth and equality of outcomes. At present, she is completing a long-term project on the organization and delivery of professional services for children.

John Hobcraft was a visiting research scholar with CHW during the spring term of 2004. At the time of his visit, he was a Professor of Population Studies in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics (from October1, 2004 he became Professor of Social Policy and Demography at the University of York). His research covers many facets of demography, including methodology and substance on the topics of child health and mortality, fertility, partnership, family, and gender. John Hobcraft has worked extensively on demographic behavior and its underpinnings for both the developing world and for Britain and Europe. During his time at Princeton he mainly worked on a paper on new directions for demographic research, that explores links to genetics and brain science. He also completed draft papers making cross-cohort comparisons on the childhood antecedents of adult socioeconomic disadvantage and on the short and long term consequences of family disruption.

Reetika Khera completed a Ph.D. from the Delhi School of Economics in the Spring of 2006. Her dissertation examined drought-related government interventions (especially public works programmes) and was based on fieldwork conducted in four districts of Rajasthan in 2002-3. During the 2006-07 academic year, she was a post-doctoral research associate and worked with Angus Deaton (in collaboration with Jean Drèze at the Delhi School of Economics), looking at the factors that affect mortality and fertility in India.

Kathleen Kiernan was a visiting scholar at the CHW during the spring term 2004. She is a Professor of Social Policy and Demography and Co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. She has conducted research on a wide range of issues pertaining to family life including, teenage parenthood, marriage, divorce, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, lone-motherhood and demography of disadvantage. Much of her research uses longitudinal data from the British birth cohort studies and more recently comparative data from a range of European countries and the USA. During her stay she carried out research on unmarried parenthood and its implications for the well-being of parents and children and also wrote a paper on “Redrawing the Boundaries of Marriage” for a special edition of Journal of Marriage and the Family on the Future of Marriage due November 2004.

Shelly Lundberg visited CHW and the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing for six week during the fall of 2005. She is Castor Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Research on Families at the University of Washington. She is currently an associate editor of Labour Economics: An International Journal, and a member of the editorial board of Review of Economics of the Household, and was a founding member of both the MacArthur Foundation's Research Network on the Family and the Inequality Modeling Group. Her research is focused in labor economics and the economics of the family, and includes both theoretical modeling (of discrimination and inequality and of family decision-making) and empirical analysis (of fertility, labor supply, wage determination, and intra-household allocation of resources). Her current research includes studies of racial segregation and inequality and the retirement and savings decisions of married couples, and NIH-funded projects on the relationship between family roles and labor market outcomes for American men and women and on the development of children as economic agents. Ph.D Northwestern University, 1981.

Sharon Maccini was a post-doctoral research associate at CHW during the 2006-07 academic year. She is a health economist focusing on the intersection of health policy, public finance and development. Her overarching research interest is the econometric evaluation of public health policies in developing countries. Current research focuses on the impact of decentralization on health outcomes and public health in the Philippines, and the role of environmental conditions at birth on health and socioeconomic status in adulthood in Indonesia. She is also beginning research on the link between weather patterns and health. She holds a BA in political science from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard University.

Robert MacCulloch was a research associate with CHW from 2002 to 2004. His research focuses on the intersection of economics and psychology, specifically in the area of well-being. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1997, and then completed a fellowship at the London School of Economics. During his tenure here, Dr. MacCulloch's research focused on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions-unemployment, income, and income inequality-and life satisfaction.

Edward Miguel was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2002-03 academic year. He came to CHW from UC Berkeley where, at the time, he was Assistant Professor of Economics. Dr. Miguel’s research focuses on health and health policy in developing countries. He has conducted several studies of de-worming programs and educational attainment in Kenya. While at Princeton, he was associated with both CHW and the Research Program in Development Studies and worked on a number of new research projects, including social networks and health; child health and educational outcomes; and pre-school nutrition and schooling in India. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000.

P. Read Montague was a visiting research scholar jointly with CHW and Psychology during the 2004 spring term. He was an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine at the time of his stay. Dr. Montague's research focuses on theoretical neuroscience, a field that investigates computational properties of the brain. He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Auburn University and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from the University in Alabama, and studied theoretical neuroscience at Rockfeller University and The Salk Institute for his postdoctoral work.

Carey Morewedge was a post-doctoral research associate at the CHW for 2006-2007. His research investigates how assessments of subjective utility are influenced by one's temporal perspective (prospectively, in real-time, and retrospectively), and how people allocate responsibility for decisions. At CHW, his primary line of research investigated the comparative influence of internal (e.g., what one is thinking) and external stimuli (e.g., what one is doing) on utility in real-time and retrospective evaluations with Professor Daniel Kahneman. Carey received a Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006.

Lauren Necochea was a policy fellow at the CHW and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during the 2006-07 academic year. Lauren graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs where she earned her masters in public affairs and a certificate in health and health policy. While a graduate student, Lauren completed a health analyst internship at the United States Agency for International Development. She has also worked as a program officer at Innovations for Poverty Action and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to assist with research on microfinance in Peru.

Jon Oberlander was a research scholar during the fall term, 2004. Jon Oberlander received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale in 1995, and is currently an associate professor at the Department of Social Medicine, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research focuses on U.S. health politics and policy, including Medicare, public policy for the elderly, national health reform, Medicaid, and rationing. During his visit, he worked on two projects: A book on market-based approaches to Medicare reform; and an analysis of recent developments in the Oregon Health Plan and their implications for state-led health reform and rationing in health policy.

Franco Peracchi was a visiting research scholar at the CHW for the fall semester of 2006. He is a Professor of Econometrics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy. After receiving a MSc in Econometrics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, he taught at UCLA, New York University, the University of Udine and D'Annunzio University in Italy. His research interests include development, labor and health economics, and the economics of social security and pensions. He is currently working on the relationships between drug policy changes, especially changes in co-payment, drug compliance and health outcomes, and the relationship between economic development and temporal and spatial variation in human heights.

Krista Perreira was a research scholar during the fall term, 2004. Perreira received her Ph.D. in Health Economics from UC Berkeley, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the inter-relationships between family, health and social policy with an emphasis on racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in health status and economic opportunity. During her stay, Perreira worked closely with the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW). She conducted research on the etiology of prenatal alcohol and tobacco use and the effects of parental alcohol and tobacco use on young childrens' health.

Alan Sanfey was a research associate with CHW and the Center of the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior from 2001 to 2004. He received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology form the University of Colorado. His research explores cognitive and neural processes that underlie human judgment and decision making.

David Schkade was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2001-2002 academic year. At the time of his visit he was the Herbert D. Kelleher Regents Professor of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the psychology of judgment and decision making, environmental resource evaluation, intuitive forecasting and psychological aspects of decision support systems. He is one of the principal investigators, along with Professor Kahneman, on a project carried out within the Center for Health and Wellbeing to create innovative new measures of human wellbeing.

Mark Schlesinger was a visiting research Scholar at the CHW during the 2006-07 academic year. His research focuses on three topics. The first explores ways in which the general public and policymakers make sense of and communicate about complex social issues, as well as how they evaluate policies to address those issues. This research examines the determinants of public opinion, the role of political framing, and the importance of norms of fairness in policy assessment. The second set of research examines the impact of ownership on the delivery of health and social services. These studies explore the comparative performance of nonprofit, for-profit and public health care agencies, the nature of public expectations involving ownership, and the extent to which ownership is related to trust in and trustworthiness of medical care. The third set of research examines the attitudinal and behavioral underpinnings of medical consumerism, comparing the effectiveness of exit versus voice to improve medical markets, and identifying the barriers to effective consumer empowerment.

Chris Seplaki was a post-doctoral researcher in the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing last year, 2003-04, and under the sponsorship of CHW in 2004-05. He received his Ph.D. in Population Health from the University of Wisconsin in 2002. Seplaki worked closely with Professor Noreen Goldman on issues related to health and aging. Together with Professor Goldman, he researched the relationship between stressful life experiences and health decline in older Taiwanese.

Stephanie Smith-Simone was a post-doctoral fellow at the CHW and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for 2006-2007. Stephanie is a social and behavioral scientist who specializes in the use of qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the impact of health policies and modifiable health behaviors on health outcomes.  Her current research examines the impact of clean indoor air policies on childhood asthma outcomes, determining effective strategies for increasing consumer demand for tobacco cessation products and services among low-income and ethnic minority populations, and tobacco use, particularly waterpipe use among college students.  Prior to joining RWJF, Stephanie held policy-related positions in the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine.  Stephanie received an MPH and PhD from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she graduated with honors and was inducted into the Delta Omega Honor Society.

Mark Stabile was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2002-03 academic year. He is a health economist who came to CHW from the University of Toronto where, at the time of his visit, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics. Dr. Stabile received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1999. His research spans several areas in health. He studies markets for health insurance, with a focus on the interplay between public and private insurance systems that co-exist in many countries. He also studies the social and economic determinants of health, and is currently researching economic status and the physical and mental health of Canadian children.

Cassio Turra was post-doctoral research associate with CHW during 2005-06. Prior to coming to CHW, he was a post-doctoral researcher in the Office of Population Research. Turra’s research interests are in socioeconomic and racial/ethnic differences in health and mortality across the life course, economic demography, aging and biodemography. While at Princeton, he worked with Professor Noreen Goldman on a project that evaluated the relationships between life challenges, social environment, physical and mental health and mortality in older Taiwanese. Turra is also a collaborator in an international team supervised by Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason that seeks to compare intergenerational transfers in different contexts using large datasets from various countries. He received his Ph.D. in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He also holds a Master in Demography from CEDEPLAR ( Brazil).

Jürg Utzinger was a research fellow with CHW and OPR from 2000 to 2003. He received his Ph.D. in Epidemiology from the Swiss Tropical Institute, University of Basel. His research is in epidemiology and control of malaria. During his fellowship at Princeton he worked closely with Prof. Burton Singer on several projects involving malaria controls in Tanzania and Malaysia.

Till von Wachter was a visiting research scholar at the CHW for the Spring of 2007. He received a Master in Economics at the University of Bonn and a PhD in Economics at the University of California Berkeley. His research interests focus on the long-term effects of labor market conditions such as job losses or recessions on labor market and social outcomes for younger, older, and less advantaged workers. Among others, he has analyzed the persistent effects of shocks early in workers' careers using longitudinal administrative data sets from Canada, Germany, and the U.S. His current work focuses on the effects of a job loss during mass-layoffs on short and long-term mortality outcomes, and on the effect of labor market conditions on entry into disability insurance and retirement. He has published in the American Economic Review and is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor.

Robert Whitaker was a visiting research scholar at CHW during the 2001-02 and 2002-03 academic years. At the time of his visit, he was Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an attending physician at Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati. He received his M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research focuses on the childhood antecedents of adult chronic disease with particular interest in the area of childhood obesity. Dr. Whitaker has published research on dietary fat consumption in school children and on risk factors for the development of obesity.

Lisa Wynn was a post-doctoral at the CHW during 2006-07. She has conducted ethnographic research in Saudi Arabia and Egypt on women's issues, social movements and identity politics, nationalism and the uses it makes of history and archaeology, tourism, and transnational movements of people and culture. Her first book on these issues, entitled "Pyramids and Nightclubs: An Ethnography of Transnational Imaginations," will be published by University of Texas Press in 2007. Her current research with James Trussell investigates the politics and discourse surrounding emergency contraception in the US, Canada, and the Arab world; the translation of new medical terms into Arabic; and language and communication between patients and health professionals when talking about sexual and reproductive health. Her next research project will explore the construction of embryonic personhood in medical texts. In past years she has taught graduate-level seminars at the Woodrow Wilson School as a Lecturer in Public and International Affairs, and in Fall 2006 she is assisting João Biehl with the Medical Anthropology course (ANT 335) in Princeton's Department of Anthropology. Lisa received her PhD from Princeton University, Dept. of Anthropology in 2003.