About Katherine Baicker

Katherine Baicker, a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy, commenced as Dean and the Emmett Dedmon Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy on August 15, 2017.

Baicker’s research focuses primarily on the factors that drive the distribution, generosity, and effectiveness of public and private health insurance, with a particular focus on the effect of health system reform.  She is currently one of the leaders of a research program investigating the many effects of expanding health insurance coverage in the context of a randomized Medicaid expansion in Oregon. 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.

Baicker is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (IOM), the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She holds appointments as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Poverty Action Lab.  She serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers, on the Advisory Board of the National Institute for Health Care Management, as a Trustee of the Mayo Clinic and of NORC, and on the Board of Directors of Eli Lilly and of HMS Holdings.

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 has served as Chair of the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission; Chair of the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth; Commissioner on the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission; and a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution. 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.