Jonathan Zelner, just finishing his PhD in Public Policy and Sociology, reflects on the role of social connectedness in reducing risks of disease and the implications for the development of northern coastal Ecuador. Worldwide, one billion people...

This spring, two Ford School students traveled to Jamaica's Blue Mountains. Their goal: to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a free clinic run by the Blue Mountain Project. The Blue Mountain summit is the highest in Jamaica: the mossy...

With 32 million previously uninsured Americans poised to receive coverage under the Affordable Care Act, some worry that this enormous influx of patients will overload the health care system—limiting access, driving up prices, and decreasing the...

In the mid-1980s, Carl Simon—a professor of mathematics, economics, and public policy—became captivated by a medical and social crisis: the HIV epidemic. At the time, scientists knew very little about the transmission system of HIV, he explains,...

In March 2009, just seven weeks after taking the oath of office, President Obama signed an executive order ending an eight-year ban on federal funding for virtually all human embryonic stem cell research. "Medical miracles do not happen simply by...

Co-director and principal investigator of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), Professor Bob Schoeni is responsible for leading one of the most widely used social science data sets in the world—a longitudinal NSF-funded study that has...

Even before we had mapped the human genome, American entrepreneurs had begun to stake claims to it. Over the last two decades, the U.S. Patent Office has issued more than 5,000 patents on parts of the human genome, leaving an alarming 20 percent of...

Their country straddling the equator, Indonesians know two basic seasons: dry and wet. However, the length of the rainy season can vary widely across this archipelago comprised of thousands of islands. Village farmers are used to this, and have...

Another faculty member on loan from the University of Michigan this year is research professor Helen Levy, who was appointed this August to serve a one-year term as a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—an agency that...

Professor Jim House is on a research leave this year as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City. From his office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he's writing a new book, tentatively titled Beyond Sicko and Health Care...