Scott Burris, James E. Beasley Professor of Law, Temple University
Paper:
Scott Burris, Jonathan Purtle, and Alina Schnake-Mahl. “A Transdisciplinary Framework for Policy Research.”
Bio:
Scott Burris, J.D., is a Professor of Law at Temple Law School, where he directs the Center for Public Health Law Research. He is also a Professor in Temple’s School of Public Health. Burris began his career in public health law during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He was the editor of the first systematic legal analysis of HIV in the United States, AIDS and the Law: A Guide for the Public (Yale University Press, 1987; New Guide for the Public published 1993), and spent several years lobbying and litigating on behalf of people with HIV as an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. Since joining the Temple faculty in 1991, his research has focused on how law influences public health and health behavior. In 2009, he founded the Public Health Law Research Program for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which has supported over 80 empirical studies of the impact of law on health, as well as LawAtlas, an innovative policy surveillance portal, and a comprehensive resource on scientific health law research methods.
He is the author of over 200 books, book chapters, articles and reports on issues including urban health; discrimination against people with HIV and other disabilities; HIV policy; research ethics; and the health effects of criminal law and drug policy. He has been particularly interested in developing theory and methods aimed at promoting effective local health governance. His work has been supported by organizations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK Department for International Development, AmfAR and the Trust for America’s Health, the Drug Policy Alliance, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He has served as a consultant to numerous United States and international organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Institute of Medicine and to the producers of the Oscar-winning film Philadelphia. He is a founder of Legal Science, LLC, a private company dedicated to the social mission of improving access to legal information and the supporting of the practice of policy surveillance. He has been a visiting scholar at RegNet at the Australian National University, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Cape Town Law School. He is affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS at Yale, and serves as an advisor to the Tsinghua University AIDS Institute, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Research Center for HIV/AIDS Public Policy and the Program in Bioethics at Monash University.
In 2014, he was the recipient of the American Public Health Association Law Section Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2018 he was the recipient of the Jay Healey Health Law Professors award. Professor Burris is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis (A.B.) and Yale Law School (J.D.).
Kristine J. Hahm, PhD Student in Public Policy and Political Economy, University of Texas at Dallas
Paper:
Kristine J. Hahm. “Who Is Left Behind? Understanding Administrative Burden in Medicaid Enrollment for Cancer Patients.”
Bio:
Kristine J. Hahm is a Ph.D. candidate in Public Policy and Political Economy and an M.S. student in Geographic Information Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research bridges health policy, spatial analysis, and data science to examine how social, geographic, and policy environments shape access to care and health equity among medically underserved populations. Using methods such as causal inference, machine learning, and GIS-based spatial modeling, her work investigates barriers to cancer care, including administrative burden, geographic access to oncology services, and the policy impacts of Medicaid expansion. She integrates large administrative datasets such as SEER-Medicaid with spatial accessibility measures to understand how policy and place jointly influence health outcomes.
William Clay Fannin, National Poverty Fellow, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and Colleen Heflin, Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs, Syracuse University
Paper:
William Clay Fannin and Colleen Heflin. “Silver Years, Empty Plates: Food Insecurity in a Changing America.”
Bio:
Colleen Heflin is a professor of public administration and international affairs. She is also a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research and a research affiliate in the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health. She has served as associate dean of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and chair of the Public Administration and International Affairs Department.
As a research and policy scholar for over twenty-five years, Heflin is regarded as a national expert on food insecurity, poverty and social policy. Heflin’s research has helped document the causes and consequences of food insecurity, identify the barriers and consequences of participation in nutrition programs, and understand the changing role of the public safety net in the lives of low-income Americans.
Heflin has published over 80 research articles, and her work has appeared in leading journals such as the American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Problems, Health Affairs, Medical Care, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Her research is regularly funded by the National Institutes for Health, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. From 2012-2017, Heflin was supported by a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service as Family Self-Sufficiency and Stability Research Scholar to explore how multiple program participation affects vulnerable families’ well-being.
Heflin has experience engaging with federal policymakers, providing expert testimony before Congress, providing technical assistance to states working to improve access to food and nutrition assistance programs, and working with county agencies to redesign their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) application process. She founded the University of Missouri Federal Statistical Research Data Center and Missouri Population, Education and Health Center. She received the W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association in 2014.
Lee Kennedy-Shaffer, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, Yale University
Paper:
Lee Kennedy-Shaffer. “The Statistical Limits of the “Laboratories of Democracy”
Bio:
Lee Kennedy-Shaffer is an Assistant Professor (Educator-Scholar Track) in Biostatistics. Lee received his PhD in Biostatistics under Dr. Michael Hughes in the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and conducted epidemiologic research there with Drs. Marc Lipsitch and Michael Mina in the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He was an Assistant Professor in the Vassar College Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2020–2024. His research focuses on randomized and observational study designs and methods for the analysis of infectious disease interventions. This includes mathematical modeling, cluster-randomized trials, and quasi-experimental designs, all with an eye toward broader population health impacts than are usually addressed by individually randomized trials. He has worked on COVID-19 data collection and analysis as well, in particular accounting for the timing and correlation of infections in interpreting test results. This work has been published in journals such as Science, Statistics in Medicine, Clinical Trials, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others. In addition, he has written on the history of statistics, FDA policy, statistics education, and causal inference in baseball.
Christopher Lowenstein, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Economics, University of Missouri – Columbia
Paper:
Christopher Lowenstein, Kate Strully, David H. Rehkopf, Heeyoung Lee, and Xiaoyu Yao. “The Earned Income Tax Credit and Racial Health Disparities across Labor
Market Contexts.”
Bio:
Chris Lowenstein is a Post Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics and member of the Social Impact Lab. He received his PhD in health policy (concentration in health economics) from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022. His research broadly focuses on the intersection of social and economic policy, labor market conditions, and health. Current projects in the Social Impact Lab include studies on the health and human capital impacts of state mandates for hearing aid coverage and the effects of state policies on youth substance use.
Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago
Paper:
Aresha Martinez-Cardoso, Clara Reyes, Bin Yu, Xinyuan Xu, Sijie Wu, Sheryl-Ann Simpson, and Mary Anne Visser. “Assessing the Impact of County-Level Immigration Policies on Birth Outcomes across Race and Nativity, 2004-2014.”
Bio:
Aresha Martinez-Cardoso is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Embodying Racism Lab. She is an interdisciplinary population health researcher whose work examines how policies shape the social and structural drivers of health and wellbeing across the life course, with a particular focus on Latinx and immigrant populations in the United States. Dr. Martinez-Cardoso’s scholarship is supported by funding from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Institute on Aging, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She earned her Ph.D. in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan and her M.S. in Community Health Sciences from UCLA. Prior to joining the University of Chicago faculty, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Matthew Phillip Motta, Associate Professor of Health Law, Policy, & Management, Boston University
Paper:
Matt Motta, Dustin Hill, Rachel Dinero, Tim Callaghan, Shana Gadarian, and Brittany Kmush. “Anti-Vaccine Policy Feedback Effects in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US.”
Bio:
Matt Motta, PhD is an associate professor in the Department of Health Law, Policy, & Management at the Boston University School of Public Health. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Center for Health Communication at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health. His research aims to study the prevalence, causes, and health policy impact of anti-science attitudes in the US. He also evaluates health communication messages aimed at promoting a wide range of public health objectives; both in controlled survey experimental environments, and "at scale" on social media. Motta is the author of Anti-Scientific Americans (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Emily Parker, Assistant Professor, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University.
Paper:
Emily Parker, Sara Hoose, Myron Gutmann, and Laura Tach. “U.S. Federal Place-Based Policy and Midlife Mortality in Disadvantaged Communities, 1990-2019.”
Bio:
Emily Parker is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She was formerly a NIA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan in the Population Studies Center and received her Ph.D. in Public Policy at Cornell University. Dr. Parker’s primary research interests are in how public policy and community context matter to the longstanding link between health and poverty. The main areas of her scholarship examine the health care safety net—specifically the Community Health Center program—as well as federal place-based policies, which target areas of concentrated disadvantage. She also studies the demographic connections between family, gender, race/ethnicity, and public policy.
Christine Percheski, Associate Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University
Paper:
Christine Percheski and Aven Peters. “Same Start, Diverging Health: State Tobacco Policies and Health in Midlife among Siblings.”
Bio:
Christine Percheski is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. Using demographic and other quantitative methods, she studies economic inequality, families, and health policy in the United States. Percheski's current research portfolio includes investigations of 1) economic transfers between siblings in adulthood; 2) the demography of siblings; 3) cohort changes in gender and racial wage gaps; 4) differences in family patterns (e.g. marriage, divorce, and fertility) for military veterans versus civilians; 5) variations in PrEP prescription rates by public health infrastructure across U.S. counties. Percheski's previous research has considered questions such as how employment patterns have changed across birth cohorts of college-educated women, how health characteristics are associated with relationship stability among married and cohabiting parents, and how the Great Recession impacted intended and unintended pregnancy rates differently for married and cohabiting women. Percheski has also examined inequalities in health insurance coverage for adults and in health care utilization and access among children. In an NSF-funded project, Percheski assessed trends in wealth of households with children relative to the elderly, variations in wealth by family structure, and racial gaps in wealth among children.
Jessica Su, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Paper:
Jessica Su, Kelly Musick and Hyo Joo Lee. “State Safety Nets and Parental Well-Being.”
Bio:
Jessica Houston Su is a sociologist who studies American family life and inequality. Her research uses quantitative methods to examine how patterns of family formation both reflect and reproduce social inequality, with a particular focus on the transition to parenthood. Her recent work investigates how broader social and policy contexts shape decisions about childbearing, parenting, and paid work, and how these processes contribute to disparities in the well-being of parents and children. Her research has been published in leading journals, including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Demography, and the Journal of Marriage and Family. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Cornell University and her B.A. in Sociology from Dartmouth College. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center.
Kristin Turney, Dean’s Professor of Sociology, University of California - Irvine
Paper:
Kristin Turney, Cheyenne Hodgen, Keramet Reiter, Naomi F. Sugie, Rebecca Tublitz, and Daniela Kaiser. “An Unequal Death Toll: The Relationship between State Punitiveness and Mortality in U.S. Prisons.”
Bio:
Kristin Turney is a professor in the Department of Sociology (and, by courtesy, Criminology, Law, and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. A researcher and educator, she investigates the role of stressors in creating, maintaining, and exacerbating social inequalities in health and wellbeing. Her current research uses quantitative and qualitative methods to understand the repercussions of stressors (particularly, but not exclusively, those stemming from the criminal legal system) on families and children. She is also working to bring greater transparency to the conditions inside jails and prisons through the creation of a digital archive, PrisonPandemic. Her research has been funded by many organizations including Arnold Ventures, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Foundation for Child Development, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Science Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation.
Katherine Wen, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and of Public Policy, Vanderbilt University
Paper:
Brandyn Churchill and Katherine Wen. “Impact of Pharmacist Scope-of-Practice Laws on Vaccination Uptake.”
Bio:
Katherine Wen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society and of Public Policy. Katherine received her Ph.D. in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University and Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Bowdoin College. Before coming to Vanderbilt, she was a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University School of Public Health. Dr. Wen studies the impact of public policies on health outcomes and health care utilization, with a focus on infectious disease and the health of older adults. Her current research examines vaccination mandates for residents and health care workers in nursing homes as well as vaccination take up among Medicare beneficiaries. Additionally, she has addressed questions related to paid sick leave, prescription opioid supply reduction strategies, and public health insurance expansions. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Health Affairs, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Medical Care, among others and has been covered by news outlets such as the Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, and Vox.
Meghan Zacher, Assistant Professor of Population Studies (Research), Brown University
Paper:
Meghan Zacher, Bhumi P. Shah, and Susan E. Short. “States, Policy, and the Rural Mortality Penalty from 1999-2019.”
Bio:
Meghan Zacher is an Assistant Professor of Population Studies in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Zacher’s research explores the social, structural, and life course determinants of population health and aging. Recent projects examine sociodemographic and place-based variation in health among older U.S. adults and its implications for individuals, families, and communities, with a particular focus on dementia, education and gender, and rural-urban and within-rural disparities.
