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.
Recipient:
Sameer Nair-Desai
Sameer is a first-year PhD student in Economics at the University of Michigan -- Ann Arbor. He holds dual degrees in Economics and International Relations from the University of Southern California. As an aspiring economist, Sameer hopes to study structural health disparities in vulnerable populations, leveraging tools of causal inference.
Prior to starting his PhD, Sameer held full-time positions as a researcher in health and economics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he served as a public health researcher with Ashish Jha, currently the Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University and previously the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator. In this role, he conducted research examining the harms of mis- and disinformation and their effects on behavior change; the politicization of health policy and science communication; and the relevance of underlying social determinants of health in exacerbating inequality.
Following this, Sameer served as a Predoctoral Research Fellow in Economics with Professor Matthew Gentzkow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and Department of Economics. In this role, he supported Professor Gentzkow and his coauthors with multiple research papers in applied microeconomics across the subfields of industrial organization, political economy, econometric theory, and health economics. Much of this research centered on the effects of digital technologies, particularly social media, on political beliefs and mental health.
His current research attempts to isolate the effects of information asymmetries and social biases on healthcare decisions and resulting patient outcomes. Additional information on Sameer’s work can be found at his website: snairdesai.github.io.
