The fellowship is made possible by a gift from Dr. Gail Wilensky, AB ’64 psych; AM ’65 econ; PhD ’68 econ. This fellowship provides full tuition, gradcare and stipend support to a candidate-level economics Ph.D. student who is doing research in the area of health economics.
2025 Recipient
Matthew Howell
Matthew is an economics PhD student at University of Michigan and aspiring health economist. He is immensely grateful for the support from the Gail Wilensky Fellowship as he begins his first year in the program.
Matthew grew up in the San Jacinto Valley of Southern California and received a B.S. in mathematics and economics from UCLA. During his undergraduate years, he worked with Kathleen McGarry on several research projects related to the economics of health and aging, including a paper examining how informal and formal long-term care receipt affect elderly individuals’ social well-being.
After graduating from UCLA, he worked with Dan Benjamin and Patrick Turley at the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) on projects in the area of social-science genomics. Most notably, mentored by Patrick Turley, he wrote a paper that uses genomic data to measure the trajectory of assortative mating—when parents are more similar than random—over time for numerous traits, including educational attainment and self-reported health. As a PhD student, Matthew plans to continue doing research on long-term care and apply his skills in statistical genomics to important questions in health economics.
