Michael Hout is professor of sociology at New York University. His research uses demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics in developed and developing countries. For much of his career, he has been involved with the General Social Survey, as chair of the Board of Overseers and co-principal investigator on the National Science Foundation grant that funds the General Social Survey. His current work uses GSS data to study changing occupational hierarchies. In other projects, he is working on heterogeneity in returns to higher education and long-term trends in public opinion. With NYU colleague Xiaogang Wu, he has just launched a survey of social life during the COVID-19 pandemic, replicating Wu's study of Wuhan, China. Hout was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, where he now chairs the advisory board for the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Hout earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University, and his M.A. and B.A. in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh.
Expert Type: Grantee
Cliff Robb
Cliff A. Robb is an associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the faculty director for the personal finance program in the School of Human Ecology. His research interests include financial decision-making (with an emphasis on the relationship between financial knowledge and observable financial behavior), college student financial behavior, and financial satisfaction and well-being. Robb has published more than 30 peer-reviewed academic papers on a variety of topics, and he serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Financial Planning, the Journal of Consumer Affairs, and the Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning. Robb earned his Ph.D. in personal financial planning from the University of Missouri-Columbia, his M.S. in consumer economics from the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, and his B.A. in psychology from the University of the South.
Douglas Wolf
Douglas Wolf is a professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs, a senior research associate at the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion, and a faculty associate at the Aging Studies Institute at the university. He is a demographer, policy analyst, program evaluator, and gerontological researcher who studies the economic, demographic, and social aspects of aging, disability, and long-term care. Wolf’s professional experience includes an appointment as an economist in the Office of Income Security of at the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services), and several years at the Urban Institute. Wolf also spent two years as a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. A primary theme of Wolf’s research is the role of public policy and of family and kinship patterns in shaping the choices facing older people and their immediate kin with respect to living and care arrangements. He earned his B.A. in sociology and a Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania.
Kanika Arora
Kanika Arora is an associate professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on gerontology with a special emphasis on informal caregiving, cannabis use among older adults, end-of-life outcomes, and Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia. She has examined the effect of several policies and programs, including paid family leave, legalization of medical marijuana, managed care, and consolidation of state area agencies on aging, on older adult and caregiver outcomes. Her recent work examines dementia prevalence and trajectories of cognitive functioning among agricultural workers, outcomes among senior and disabled individuals under Medicaid managed care, and the effect of a dementia onset on change in risky behaviors (such as smoking and alcohol use) among older adults. She completed her Ph.D. in public administration from the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
Stefan Pichler
Stefan Pichler is an associate professor of public health at the Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Prior to that, he was a senior researcher at the KOF institute at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. His research is in the field of applied health and labor economics. His research on sick leave has been featured by several news outlets and cited as a reason for the Healthy Families Act and the FFCRA emergency sick leave provision. He completed his doctoral studies at the Graduate School of Finance Economics and Management and earned his Ph.D. in 2013 at the Technische Universität Darmstad in Germany.
Nicolas R. Ziebarth
Nicolas R. Ziebarth is an associate professor in the Department for Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. He studies the interaction of social insurance systems with labor markets and population health. In particular, he is an international expert on the economics of sick leave and has published numerous refereed journal articles on the topic. Another focus of his work is the driving forces and implications of risky health behavior such as smoking, drinking, or overeating. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Berlin Institute of Technology.
Julia Goodman
Julia Goodman is an assistant professor at the Oregon Health & Science University and Portland State University School of Public Health. She is a health policy researcher who studies how work and work-related policies affect maternal and infant health. She earned her Ph.D. in health policy and her M.P.H. in maternal and child health from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a B.Sc. in psychology from McGill University.
Janusz Wojtusiak
Janusz Wojtusiak is the Professor of Health Informatics and Director of the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory at George Mason University. His research interests include the development and use of intelligent systems in healthcare. In particular, he focuses on creating artificial intelligence algorithms for clinical decision support and knowledge discovery in medical data, and supporting health services research. He obtained with honors his M.S. in computer science from Jagiellonian University in 2001 and Ph.D. in computational sciences and informatics, with a concentration in computational intelligence and knowledge mining, from George Mason University in 2007.
Kathryn Wagner
Kathryn Wagner is an assistant professor of economics at Marquette University in Milwaukee. She is an economist whose work focuses on health economics, public policy, and programs related to disability. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame in 2015 and her B.A. from Albion College in 2010.
Laura Dague
Laura Dague is an associate professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She is a health economist who studies the programs and policies affecting the lives of low-income people and people with disabilities. Dague is a faculty affiliate at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty and a Faculty Research Fellow in the NBER's Health Economics program. She received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin.