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I am a health economist and the Bruce A. Beal, Robert L. Beal and Alexander S. Beal Associate Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. In my research, I use randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental methods to evaluate the impact of maternal and child health programs and policies, both in the United States and East African countries. I explore the behavioral channels by which health policies translate into health outcomes, with the aim of embedding this evidence into policy design and increasing policy impact. My work has explored the impact of incentives, subsidies, information, and decision architecture on health seeking behavior and health outcomes in the domains of malaria and maternal health. I often combine concepts from economics and psychology to explore drivers of critical health behaviors including maternity care seeking, family planning, and clinical quality of care. I also use a variety of quasi-experimental designs to evaluate the impact of large health policy and health system changes on population health, including subsidy policies and provider payment models.

My work has been been published widely in top economics, medical and public health journals and has been referenced in major national and international publications. I have won a mentorship award and a teaching award from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. My research on subsidy policies for insecticide treated nets was deemed by Vox as a top social science paper of the decade. I was a member of the WHO Global Malaria Program’s Technical Expert Group on Surveillance, Monitoring and Evaluation and have served on NIH expert review panels related to implementation science and impact evaluation. I am also the co-Director of Harvard’s LEAD Fellowship Program for Women Leaders in Global Health, and a faculty affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT and of the Center for International Development at Harvard.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Economics from Wesleyan University and her PhD in Economics from MIT, where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.