Besty Cliff, PhD
Besty Cliff’s research explores whether treating people as consumers of medical care, such that we expect them to make discernments about price and value, leads to better health care quality and more efficient spending patterns. A primary focus of my research agenda is the use of health insurance benefit design to influence spending and utilization. My training is in health services research, with a theoretical and methodological focus in economics. I primarily use quasi-experimental research designs and econometric statistical techniques to measure the effects of policies or interventions. Often, my data come from large databases with medical and pharmaceutical claims from health insurers. I have led projects related to effects of health insurance benefit design in both the commercial and Medicaid populations, attitudes of consumers in high-deductible plans, and impacts of interventions to influence use of high- and low-value health care services.
Prior to pursuing my doctoral degree, I was a journalist and reported on health care policy for newspapers and magazines for nearly a decade. In that career, I wrote stories about hospital financing, medical errors, uninsurance, underinsurance, medical and pharmaceutical prices, care coordination, mental health, and the impact of health policies on individuals.
Joseph Bruch, PhD
Joseph Bruch is a social epidemiologist and health policy researcher. He graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences and a Master’s Degree in Biostatistics. His research examines the role of the financial sector in population health by combining approaches from epidemiology, health services research, and health economics. He has authored multiple studies investigating the influence of private equity ownership in health care, with a focus on costs and quality. He is currently working on several projects that link financial lending patterns and access to capital to health outcomes and inequities.
Olga Morozova, PhD
Olga (Olya) Morozova is an infectious disease epidemiologist and a public health modeler. Her research focuses on interaction between HIV and substance use disorders, as well as infectious disease transmission more broadly. She has been actively involved in COVID-19 research, providing modeling and forecasting support to the Connecticut Department of Public Health and the governor’s office. She is also interested in quantitative methods in infectious disease epidemiology, in particular causal inference in the presence of contagion. In the past, Dr. Morozova served as a strategic information expert at the national HIV and tuberculosis control programs in Ukraine, and as a public health consultant in a variety of international settings.
Jasmin Tiro, PhD, MPH
Jasmin A. Tiro, PhD, MPH, has joined University of Chicago as a Professor in PHS and as the new Associate Director of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences in University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is a behavioral scientist focused on cancer care delivery research. Tiro identifies multilevel determinants of cancer prevention behaviors in order to develop and test interventions that improve health outcomes for underserved patients. She is committed toward growing and advancing the Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program and mentoring the next generation of population scientists to address well-documented disparities on the South Side of Chicago.