I am an Associate Professor (research) of Economics at the University of  Southern California (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), Director of the CESR Center for the Study of Health Inequality (CSHI), Associate Professor of Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, School of Business and Economics, and Research Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam.

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I am an award-winning astrophysicist who turned to business/management then policy analysis and economics. I was at the forefront of several breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics, two of which were considered the 5th and 10th most significant scientific discoveries (in all science fields) of 1997 and 1999, respectively, by Science magazine. After completion of my doctoral thesis in astrophysics, I worked as a Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, U.S.A. I have authored over 70 scientific publications in top scientific journals (e.g., six papers in Nature). Following my career in astrophysics, I obtained an MBA from INSEAD at the Singapore and French campuses, and subsequently joined L.E.K Consulting, a global strategy-consulting firm, as a Senior Consultant in the Los Angeles office.

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I joined the RAND Corporation in 2006, USC’s CESR in 2013 and VU Amsterdam in 2018. In these positions my focus has been on understanding the substantial disparities in health by socioeconomic status, utilizing economic principles and social-science genetic methods. 

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