Tamara Dubowitz

Biography

Tamara Dubowitz is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Trained in social epidemiology with concentrations in maternal and child health and public health nutrition, Dubowitz's research interests include neighborhood effects, particularly that of the built physical and social environment; obesity and diet-related disease; and the health and nutrition effects of social policy (e.g., housing policy, food stamps, and WIC) and monitoring and evaluation. Her work has utilized both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine individuals within their social and structural contexts, having examined immigrant status and duration of residence in the United States, structure of the workday, access to child care, and competing daily-life constraints alongside neighborhood socioeconomic status and racial composition.

In addition to spending more than two years working on women's health programs and development with the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso, West Africa, Dubowitz led an evaluation of a maternal and child nutrition program led by UNICEF India. More recently, she has looked at factors of the built environment and their association with prevalence of obesity in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dubowitz received her M.Sc. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her S.M. and Sc.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health.