Katherine Baicker

Provost of the University of Chicago and Emmett Dedmon Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy
Provost Katherine Baicker

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Katherine Baicker serves as the 15th Provost of the University of Chicago.

As Provost, she is responsible for academic and research programs across the University and oversees the University’s budget.

A leading scholar in the economic analysis of health care policy, she is the Emmett Dedmon Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she served as Dean for five years prior to being appointed Provost.

Baicker’s research focuses on the effectiveness of public and private health insurance, including the effect of reforms on the distribution and quality of care. Her large-scale research projects include the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a randomized evaluation of the effects of Medicaid coverage. Her research has been published in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Health Affairs, JAMA, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Baicker was the C. Boyden Gray Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is a director of Eli Lilly and a trustee of the Mayo Clinic. Baicker is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

She serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers and the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Health Care Management. She has served as Chair of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission; Chair of the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth; and Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. From 2005-2007, she served as a Senate-confirmed Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, where she played a leading role in the development of health policy. Baicker earned her B.A. in economics from Yale and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard.