Staff
Project Staff
Nicole Lurie, Center Director
Nicole Lurie, MD, MSPH, is the Director of the RAND Center for Population Health and Health Disparities and Co-Director of the RAND Center for Domestic and International Health Security. She is also a Senior Natural Scientist and the Paul O'Neill Alcoa Professor of Health Policy at RAND.
Before coming to RAND, Dr. Lurie was Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Minnesota, and most recently, Medical Advisor to the Commissioner at the Minnesota Department of Health. From 1998-2001, she served as Assistant Secretary of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
As Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health at HHS, Dr. Lurie had line responsibility for the Office of Emergency Preparedness, which included development of emergency response plans at state and local levels, including plans for events involving multiple jurisdictions and development of the pandemic influenza plan. She was involved with flu surveillance and response at a time when hospitals in multiple jurisdictions across the country were full, with multiple preparedness and response exercises, and with other efforts to directly link public health and health delivery sectors.
Throughout her career, Dr. Lurie's research has focused on health services, primarily in the areas of access to and quality of care, managed care, mental health, prevention, and health disparities. She is leading a collaborative effort, centered at RAND, to study the impact of changes in the health care safety net in the District of Columbia, and to develop a collaborative, public-private health data infrastructure for the District and the region.
Dr. Lurie serves as Senior Editor for Health Services Research and has served on editorial boards and as a reviewer for numerous journals. She was President of the Society of General Internal Medicine, is currently on the board of directors for the Academy of Health Services Research, and has served on multiple national committees. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the AHSR Young Investigator Award, the Nellie Westerman Prize for Research in Ethics, and the Heroine in Health Care Award, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine.
Dr. Lurie attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed her residency and MSPH at UCLA, where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar.
Jose Escarce, Director, Data and Methods Core
Jose J. Escarce, MD, Ph.D., is a Senior Natural Scientist at RAND. His research interests and expertise include health economics, managed care, physician behavior, racial and ethnic disparities in medical care, and technological change in medicine. Dr. Escarce has studied racial differences in the utilization of surgical procedures and diagnostic tests by elderly Medicare beneficiaries, and was lead investigator of a study of racial differences in medical care utilization among older persons that was based on the 1987 National Medical Expenditures Survey. Recent research for an NIH conference used the 1996 - 1998 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to assess racial and ethnic differences in public and private sources of health care expenditures in the Medicare population. He was also co-investigator of a study that used interactive videodisc technology to assess the impact of patient race and gender on physician decision-making for patients with chest pain.
Dr. Escarce is currently working on several projects that address socio-demographic barriers to access in managed care organizations, and is principal investigator of a program project entitled "Health Care Markets and Vulnerable Populations," which uses the MEPS and is funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Among other issues, the program project addresses racial and ethnic differences in access to and quality of medical care. He was member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.
Dr. Escarce graduated from Princeton University, earned a master's degree in physics from Harvard University, obtained his medical degree and doctorate in health economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his residency at Stanford University.
Research Staff
Chloe Bird
Dr. Chloe E. Bird, Ph.D., is a Sociologist at RAND, Professor of Sociology at the RAND Graduate School, and Associate Editor of Women's Health Issues. Her primary research interest is in the social determinants of gender differences in physical and mental health and health care. Her recent work assessing the contribution of gender differences in social and economic resources to the development of illness, quality of care and differences in care at the end of life is published in Journal of General Internal Medicine, Journal of Palliative Medicine, Medical Care, and Women's Health Issues. Her current work in this area examines gender differences in health care utilization of patients with HIV and for those with depression. Her related work examining the impact of school and peer contexts on adolescent smoking behavior is published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior. In addition, she is writing a book for Cambridge University Press on the contribution of differences in men's and women's lives to differences in their health.
Dr. Bird has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois
Deborah Cohen
Deborah Cohen, M.D., MPH, is a Senior Natural Scientist at RAND. She has extensive experience in the development of public health programs and policy research. She is currently studying the association of land use and community characteristics with a variety of health outcomes, including physical activity in adolescents. As an ancillary study to the Trial of Activity of Adolescent Girls, a multi-site randomized controlled intervention trial, she is evaluating data from six cities on the impact of urban design and park facilities on physical activity.
Dr. Cohen's recent research has focused on the impact of structural factors (physical and social environments) on health and health behaviors. She has studied the association of premature mortality with deteriorated housing. Other current projects include examining the impact of the 1992 Civil Unrest in Los Angeles on health outcomes, the availability of after-school activities for high school students in Los Angeles, particularly opportunities for sports participation, and an analysis of the data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood survey, to identify structural factors that may be associated with teen pregnancy, STDs and other adolescent development concerns.
Dr. Cohen attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained her Masters in Public Health from UCLA.
Tamara Dubowitz
Tamara Dubowitz is an Associate Policy Researcher at RAND. Trained in Social Epidemiology with concentrations in Maternal and Child Health and Public Health Nutrition, Dubowitz' 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 childcare and competing daily-life constraints alongside of neighborhood socioeconomic status and racial composition. Dr. Dubowitz has also worked internationally. In addition to spending 2 1/2 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, Pa.
Dr. Dubowitz received her doctorate and master of science from Harvard School of Public Health as well as her master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Brian Finch
Brian Karl Finch, Ph.D., is a Sociologist and Professor of Public Policy at RAND and a Health Disparities Scholar with the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (National Institutes of Health). He is also a core member of the RAND Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. Before joining RAND, Dr. Finch was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Peace & Conflict Studies and Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Finch's work crosses the disciplinary boundaries of social demography, social epidemiology, and medical sociology to investigate the causes and correlates of population health disparities, specifically socioeconomic and race/ethnic disparities in health outcomes and behaviors among adults and biological/social interactions across the early life-course. He is a Principal- or Co Principal- Investigator on several NIH- and DHHS-funded projects researching population health disparities. His research also explicitly addresses the effect of neighborhood context on health behaviors using multi-level methodologies including hierarchical linear models and complex survival models.
Dr. Finch received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Roland Sturm
Roland Sturm, Ph.D., is a Senior Economist at RAND. Dr. Sturm's recent research has focused on the economics of healthy living, health care costs of poor health habits, changes in mental health and substance abuse services under managed care, and effects of the parity legislation for behavioral health care. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and has testified on health care issues in Congress and several state legislatures. From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Sturm directed the economic and policy research program of the joint RAND/UCLA Research Center on Managed Care and was awarded the National Institute of Health Care Management's Award for excellence in health services research in 2001. His latest projects, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, analyze how urban design and neighborhood characteristics affect lifestyles and health.
Dr. Sturm received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.
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