Visiting Researchers
Jason A. Levitis
Senior Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Jason A. Levitis ’05 is a Senior Fellow and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Solomon Center. He is an expert on health care and tax law and policy, the coverage and revenue provisions of the Affordable Care Act, regulatory process, and tax administration. From 2009 to 2017 he served in senior positions at the U.S. Treasury Department, working to pass the ACA and then leading implementation of its tax provisions and state innovation waivers, as well as working on other tax issues. He also assisted the Department of Justice in ACA litigation, including NFIB v. Sebelius, King v. Burwell, and House v. Burwell. Prior to coming to Treasury, he served at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Connecticut Voices for Children, and the Greater New York Hospital Association. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Wesleyan University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics.
Hazar Khidir, MD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Hazar Khidir completed her undergraduate studies in Sociology/Anthropology and Biology at Truman State University. She then attended Harvard Medical School where she obtained her Doctor of Medicine and completed her clinical residency in emergency medicine at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Khidir is a first-generation American. Her experiences of migration have inspired the main question at the center at her scholarly work: Why is it that accidents of geography and birth are what determine how nourished, educated, and healthy one is?
Most recently, her work has focused on structural intersectionality, how intersecting systems of oppression shape health and result in overlapping geographic, racial and ethnic, and socioeconomic health inequities. She is also interested in the use of value-based delivery tools like quality measurement to incentivize health care systems to advance health equity and reduce health disparities.
Christen Linke Young
Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Christen Linke Young ‘09 is a fellow with the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Solomon Center. Her research primarily concerns how Americans get health care coverage, how that coverage is financed, and how the health care system can be improved to make coverage affordable and accessible to more people. Previously, she was the Principal Deputy Secretary for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, where she focused on developing cross-agency initiatives, implementing innovative policy solutions, and providing day-to-day operational leadership of the Department. She also previously held a number of roles in the federal government. She was Principal Deputy Director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, the agency within the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services that oversees private health insurance initiatives. In addition, she served as the Senior Policy Advisor for Health at the White House and the Director of Coverage Policy in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Health Reform. She began her career in government as a policy analyst with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Young holds a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Stanford University and a law degree from Yale Law School.
Faculty & Scholars in Residence
Anne L. Alstott
Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation
Anne Alstott is the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor in Taxation at Yale Law School. An expert in taxation and social policy, she was named a professor at Yale Law School in 1997 and originally named the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor of Taxation in 2004. She served as deputy dean in 2002 and 2004 and has won the Yale Law Women teaching award three times. From 2008 to 2011, she was the Manley O. Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at Columbia Law and before that, served as an attorney-advisor in the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Legislative Counsel. Her books include No Exit: What Parents Owe Children and What Society Owes Parents (Oxford University Press, 2004) and The Stakeholder Society (with Bruce Ackerman, Yale University Press, 1999). She holds an A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Full Biography
Personal Website
Ian Ayres
Deputy Dean and William K. Townsend Professor of Law
Ian Ayres '86 is a lawyer and an economist. He is Deputy Dean and the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management. Professor Ayres has been a columnist for Forbes magazine, a commentator on public radio’s Marketplace, and a contributor to the New York Times’ Freakonomics Blog. His research has been featured on PrimeTime Live, Oprah and Good Morning America and in Time and Vogue magazines. Ayres is a co-founder of stickK.com, a web site that helps you stick to your goals. In 2020, Harvard University Press published Ayres’s twelfth book, “Disarmed By Choice: Liberating Individuals to Reduce Gun Violence” (with Fredrick Vars). Ian has also published over 100 articles on a wide range of topics including several empirical studies. In 2006, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book with Greg Klass, Insincere Promises: The Law of Misrepresented Intent, won the 2006 Scribes book award “for the best work of legal scholarship published during the previous year.” Professor Ayres has been ranked as one of the most prolific and most-cited law professors of his generation. He was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, received his B.A. (majoring in Russian studies and economics) and J.D. from Yale and his Ph.D in economics from M.I.T.
Lori Bruce
Associate Director, Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University
Lori's work centers on ethical policymaking and ethical policy analysis. She has influenced law and authored policy recommendations on scores of issues including ethics of psychedelics, medical aid in dying, trauma-informed policymaking, pediatric organ donation after cardiac death, infant safe haven and “baby box” laws, explicit consent for pelvic and prostate exams, palliative sedation, and doctor/patient social media communications. She has consulted for the President Obama’s Commission on Bioethics on community views relating to the Guatemalan syphilis research experiments and lectures nationally and internationally including such places as Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, US Coast Guard Academy, Monash University in Australia, the Centre for Values, Ethics and Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, the Centre for Faith, Ethics and Society at University of Notre Dame Australia, and Harvard University. Lori is Co-Director of Yale-New Haven Hospital’s Adult Ethics Committee, serves on the Pediatric Ethics Committee, and is a member of Yale’s IRBs, reviewing medical research on AI, behavioral studies, and large-scale tissue and data repositories. She has also served on bioethics committees at Harvard, including the Cambridge Health Alliance and the innovative Community Ethics Committee and is the ethics consultant to Yale’s Gender Clinic.
Zack Cooper
Associate Professor of Public Health and Economics
Zack Cooper is an Associate Professor of Health Policy and of Economics at Yale University. He is also a Resident Fellow at the school’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where he directs the ISPS Health Center. Professor Cooper’s work is focused on using big data analysis and economic research to improve health care policy. There are three strands to his work. The first is examining the growth and variation in health care spending in the United States. The second is analyzing how competition in hospital and insurance markets impacts health care providers’ quality, prices, and productivity. The third is examining how information and incentives influence how individuals choose doctors and hospitals and spend on health care services. Professor Cooper received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics where re remains a Faculty Associate at the school’s Centre for Economic Performance.
Randi Hutter Epstein
Writer in Residence for the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale Medical School
Randi Hutter Epstein is a lecturer in the English Department at Yale College and a Writer in Residence for the Program for Humanities in Medicine at Yale Medical School. She teaches an undergraduate seminar, Writing About Medicine & Public Health. Epstein is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Journalism. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in History & Sociology of Science, a Masters of Science degree from Columbia University School of Journalism, a Masters in Public Health degree from the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and a Medical Degree from Yale University School of Medicine. Epstein has lectured on and written articles about the history of medicine as well current issues in science and health care. She is particularly interested in the intersections of medicine and society—how cultural ideas about health impact doctor-patient communication and shape medical progress. Epstein is the author of two books: Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank (W.W. Norton, 2010) and AROUSED: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything (W.W. Norton, 2018).
Howard P. Forman
Professor of Diagnostic Radiology, Public Health, Economics and Management
Howard P. Forman is a Professor of Diagnostic Radiology, Public Health, Economics and Management; Director of the M.D./M.B.A. Program; Director of Healthcare Curriculum, M.B.A. for Executives Program; and Lecturer in Ethics, Politics, and Economics, at the Yale School of Management. Professor Forman also directs the healthcare management program in the Yale School of Public Health and teaches healthcare economics in the Department of Economics. As a practicing emergency/trauma radiologist, he is actively involved in patient care and issues related to financial administration, healthcare compliance and contracting. His research has been focused on improving imaging services delivery through better access to information. He has worked in the U.S. Senate as a health policy fellow on Medicare legislation.
Cary Gross
Professor of Medicine & Director of the Cancer Outcomes Public Policy and Effectiveness Research
Cary Gross is Professor of Medicine and the Co-Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. As Director of the Cancer Outcomes Public Policy and Effectiveness Research (COPPER) Center at Yale, the over-arching theme of his work is the disconnect between evidence generated from clinical research and the actual needs of older persons with cancer. He uses comparative effectiveness studies and policy-relevant research to address this important knowledge gap. As a general internist, Gross and his colleagues have used state of the art techniques to shed new insights about cancer screening, risk stratification, and treatment. Ongoing investigations focus on the understanding variability and value in cancer care, with a focus on the complex interplay between health policy, clinical decision-making, and patient centered outcomes. He also has a long-standing interest in research ethics and integrity. Ongoing policy-relevant work by Gross and his colleagues includes American Cancer Society-funded assessments of the impact of state breast density notification laws on patterns of cancer screening, as well as determinants of access to gene expression profiling among women with breast cancer.
Peter T. Grossi Jr.
Visiting Lecturer in Law
Peter T. Grossi Jr. ’73 is a Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School and a senior litigator for Arnold & Porter LLP. He has worked for more than 25 years to defend pharmaceutical and other companies in product liability actions. For each of the last five years, Chambers has named him the "senior statesman" of the national products liability and mass torts bar. Grossi has also taught courses on product liability at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, University of Virginia, and American University.
Jacob S. Hacker
Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science
Jacob S. Hacker, Ph.D., is the Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is also a board member of The Century Foundation, Economic Policy Institute, The American Prospect, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network steering committee, and a former Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he is the author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, written with Paul Pierson (2010), The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (2006), The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002), and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton's Plan for Health Security (1997), co-winner of the Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration. He is also co-author, with Paul Pierson, of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) and has edited three volumes--most recently, Shared Responsibility, Shared Risk: Government, Markets, and Social Policy in the Twenty-First Century, edited with Ann O'Leary (2012).
Dan M. Kahan
Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology
Dan M. Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. In addition to risk perception, his areas of research include criminal law and evidence. Prior to coming to Yale in 1999, Professor Kahan was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School. He also served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court (1990-91) and to Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1989-90). He received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his J.D. from Harvard University.
Amy Kapczynski
Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Global Health Justice Partnership
Amy Kapczynski '03 is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and faculty director of the Global Health Justice Partnership. She joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012. Her areas of research including information policy, intellectual property law, international law, and global health. Prior to coming to Yale, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She also served as a law clerk to Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen G. Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court, and to Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She received her A.B. from Princeton University, M.Phil. from Cambridge University, M.A. from Queen Mary and Westfield College at University of London, and J.D. from Yale Law School.
Bonnie Kaplan
Yale Interdisiciplinary Bioethics Center Scholar; Faculty, Program on Biomedical Ethics, Yale Medical School
Bonnie Kaplan, of the Yale Center for Medical Informatics, is a Yale Interdisiciplinary Bioethics Center Scholar, a Faculty Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Faculty in the Yale Medical School’s Program for Biomedical Ethics and also the Center for Biomedical Data Science, and Faculty Affiliate of the Yale Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. Her publications in key journals are some of the most read papers, editor’s choice, and foundational writings on informatics ethical, legal, and social issues; user and organizational perspectives and experiences with health information technology; and ethnographic sociotechnical evaluation. Among her most recent and forthcoming publications are papers on ethical, legal, and social issues in mobile health and mental health, telemedicine, personalized medicine, health data privacy, and health information technology software, and also sociotechnical theory and health information technology failure. She was elected twice as chair of the American Medical Informatics Association’s People and Organizational Issues Working Group and of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Working Group and served two terms as chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Organizational and Social Issues Working Group. She served on AMIA's Vendor Contract Issues Task Force, having previously chaired the AMIA Consumer Health Informatics Task Force. She has taught undergraduate through post-doctoral and professional courses in business, medical, nursing, and arts and sciences programs, as well as on-line graduate and certificate courses in biomedical informatics and in bioethics. She is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a recipient of the AMIA President’s Award. Her B.A. from Cornell University is in interdisciplinary mathematics and computer science and her M.A. and Ph.D. in history (history of science) is from the University of Chicago.
Stephen Latham
Lecturer in Law
Stephen Latham is a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School as well as Director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Senior Research Scholar in Political Science and a Lecturer in Management. Prior to joining the Center for Bioethics, Latham taught at Quinnipiac University School of Law, where he was the Director of the Center for Health Law and Policy. Latham has also taught business ethics at the Yale School of Management as well as courses at Northwestern University, University of Chicago, UC Berkley, and Harvard. He has served as the Director of Ethical Standards at the American Medical Association, and as secretary to its Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. Latham is a former board member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, from which he received a Distinguished Service Award. He is faculty chair of Yale’s Human Subjects Committee and serves on the Medical Review Board of Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families.
Latham’s publications on health law, professionalism, and bioethics have appeared in numerous journals and law reviews, including JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Legal Medicine. Latham holds a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California at Berkley, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College.
Mark Mercurio
Professor of Pediatrics; Chief, Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine; Director, Program for Biomedical Ethics, Yale School of Medicine
Dr. Mercurio is Professor of Pediatrics, Chief of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, and the Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics at Yale School of Medicine. He leads the faculty and post-doctoral fellows in Neonatology, overseeing medical care provided in Newborn Intensive Care Units at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital, Lawrence and Memorial Hospital, Bridgeport Hospital, and Waterbury Hospital. In addition, he is actively involved in the ethics education of Yale medical students, attending physicians, fellows, residents, nurses, and physician associate students. He has more than 25 years of experience as a clinical neonatologist, including the training of fellows and residents in the Newborn ICU, and over 20 years’ experience in clinical ethics consultation in adult and pediatric medicine. Dr. Mercurio has been an invited lecturer nationally and internationally, focusing on analyses of ethical issues in adult and pediatric medicine, primarily pediatrics. He has for many years served as medical faculty for the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE). Published work has appeared in Pediatrics, The Hastings Center Report, Seminars in Perinatology, the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Journal of Perinatology, and others. He has served on the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Bioethics, and is co-editor of a textbook of pediatric ethics.
Viveca Morris
Solomon Center Scholar in Animal Law, Ethics & Health; Executive Direrctor of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program
Viveca Morris is the Solomon Center Scholar in Animal Law, Ethics & Health as well as an Associate Research Scholar in Law and the Executive Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School. Morris founded the Law, Ethics & Animals Program in partnership with Faculty Co-Directors Doug Kysar and Jonathan Lovvorn. Her research focuses on the legal, moral, and scientific questions raised by humanity’s treatment of non-human creatures, and on how insights from multiple disciplines, the power of storytelling, and the force of law can together be leveraged to address industrialized abuses of animals, people and the environment. Morris co-hosts and co-produces the Yale University podcast "When We Talk About Animals,” which features in-depth interviews with leading thinkers about animals and what it means to be human.
Fiona Scott Morton
Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale School of Management
Fiona Scott Morton is the Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics at Yale School of Management. An expert in competitive strategy, Professor Scott Morton received her undergraduate degree in Economics from Yale and her Ph.D., also in Economics, from MIT. Her research focuses on empirical studies of competition among firms in areas such as pricing, entry, and product differentiation. Her articles are published widely, in journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, the RAND Journal of Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Professor Scott Morton has taught the core perspective The Competitor, in which she introduces students to the dynamics of competition using tools from economics and integrating techniques from marketing, OB, accounting, and other disciplines. She also regularly teaches Competitive Strategy, a popular elective applying concepts from Industrial Organization to business problems. In 2007, she was chosen by students to receive the Yale SOM Alumni Association Teaching Award, an honor which is given to one professor each year. She is a frequent speaker at academic research seminars and conferences across the United States and Europe. She served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis (Chief Economist) at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice from May 2011 to December 2012. In that capacity she supervised a staff of Ph.D. economists who provided the economic analysis critical to enforcing competitor law.
Douglas G. NeJaime
Professor of Law
Douglas NeJaime is Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches in the areas of family law, legal ethics, law and sexuality, and constitutional law. In Fall 2016, he was the Martin R. Flug Visiting Professor of Law at Yale. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2017, NeJaime was Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he served as Faculty Director of the Williams Institute, a research institute on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. He has also served on the faculties at UC Irvine School of Law and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and he was Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in Spring 2017. NeJaime is the co-author of Cases and Materials on Sexuality, Gender Identity, and the Law (with Carlos Ball, Jane Schacter, and William Rubenstein). His recent scholarship includes “The Nature of Parenthood,” 126 Yale Law Journal 2260 (2017); “Marriage Equality and the New Parenthood,” 129 Harvard Law Review 1185 (2016); “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” 124 Yale Law Journal 2516 (2015), with Reva Siegel; and “Before Marriage: The Unexplored History of Nonmarital Recognition and Its Relationship to Marriage,” 102 California Law Review 87 (2014). NeJaime has twice received the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best sexual orientation legal scholarship published in the previous year, and has also been the recipient of UCI Law’s Professor of the Year Award and Loyola Law School’s Excellence in Teaching Award.
Reva Siegel
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law
Professor Reva Siegel is the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Siegel’s writing draws on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality and to analyze how courts interact with representative government and popular movements in interpreting the Constitution. Professor Siegel is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary fellow of the American Society for Legal History. She serves on the board of Advisors and the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society and on the General Council of the International Society of Public Law.
Priscilla Smith
Associate Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow, Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice, Information Society Project
Priscilla (Cilla) Smith is an Associate Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Prior to joining the ISP, Smith was an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights for 13 years, serving as the U.S. Legal Program Director from 2003-2007, and litigated cases nationwide, including Gonzales v. Carhart, 127 S. Ct. 1610 (2007), and Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67 (2001). She conducts research and writes on privacy, reproductive rights and justice, and the information society.
Renée Sirbu
Postgraduate Associate, Yale Digital Ethics Center
Renée Sirbu is a Postgraduate Associate at the Yale Digital Ethics Center. She received her B.Sc. in Human Biology, Bioethics, and Analytic Philosophy at the University of Toronto ('21) and her M.P.H. in Health Policy and Public Health Modeling from the Yale School of Public Health ('23). Renée's interests include information and privacy law, healthcare and national cybersecurity, and AI/ML ethics. Her research is primarily focused on the ethical use of healthcare AI in clinical settings, as well as the establishment of a robust governance framework for reproductive and sensitive health data at the federal level. Additionally, she is working to create a regulatory landscape for postmortem digital autonomy, seeking to answer the question "what happens to our digital selves after we die?" Renée is also the National Director of Education in Biotechnology Policy for Nucleate, an affiliate of the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London, and an alumna trainee of the Population Health Analytics Laboratory at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (University of Toronto).
Tom R. Tyler
Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology
Tom R. Tyler is the Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School. He is also a professor (by courtesy) at the Yale School of Management. He joined the Yale Law faculty in January 2012 as a professor of law and psychology. He was previously a University Professor at New York University, where he taught in both the psychology department and the law school. Prior to joining NYU in 1997, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Northwestern University. Tyler’s research explores the role of justice in shaping people’s relationships with groups, organizations, communities, and societies. In particular, he examines the role of judgments about the justice or injustice of group procedures in shaping legitimacy, compliance, and cooperation. He is the author of several books, including Why People Cooperate (2011); Legitimacy and Criminal Justice (2007); Why People Obey the Law (2006); Trust in the Law (2002); and Cooperation in Groups (2000). Professor Tyler was awarded the Harry Kalven prize for “paradigm shifting scholarship in the study of law and society” by the Law and Society Association in 2000, and in 2012, he was honored by the International Society for Justice Research with its Lifetime Achievement Award for innovative research on social justice. He holds a B.A. in psychology from Columbia and an M.A. and Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles.