CDHA Welcomes New Director

The CDHA executive committee has selected Jason Fletcher to become the Center’s next director, effective this month.  The Center has been funded through the National Institute on Aging for nearly 20 years.  Fletcher is Romnes Professor of Public Affairs and Sociology with additional appointments in Agricultural and Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences.  He is on the executive committees of the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE), Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), and the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at Wisconsin (WiscRDC).  He also is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), and Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (HCEO) and directs the Wisconsin Policy Analysis Lab (WiscPal), which is an group of students and faculty who integrate knowledge, data, and methods from multiple disciplines to uncover why, when, and on whom policies work.

Fletcher is replacing Professor Pamela Herd, who is joining Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy this summer. Herd has served as CDHA director since 2015.

Fletcher is an expert in many of the Center’s core foci, including biodemography, life course analysis, understanding health disparities, and linking economic and health processes.  His work has been supported by several NIH institutes including the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Child Health and Development, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Institute on Drug Abuse as well as several foundations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, William T. Grant Foundation, and Russell Sage Foundation, among others. He has published over 100 academic articles, including his recent book on biodemography, The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals about Ourselves, Our History, and the Future and is leading a Cluster Hiring Initiative on Social Genomics this fall.