Marcella Alsan is Director of the Health Inequality Lab and Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Previously, she served as the Angelopoulos Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Alsan received a BA from Harvard University, a master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health, a MD from Loyola University, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Alsan trained at Brigham and Women’s Hospital Hiatt Global Health Equity Residency Fellowship – then combined the PhD with an Infectious Disease Fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is an applied microeconomist studying health inequality.
In recognition and support of her work studying the causes and consequences of health disparities, Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. She is the co-recipient of the 2019 Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics, the 2021 William G. Manning Memorial Award for the Best Research in Health Econometrics, and the 2025 Kenneth J. Arrow Award for Best Paper in Health Economics. Alsan is an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics the Associate Editor of Journal of Economic Literature and chair editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics. She is the Co-Chair of the Health Care Delivery Initiative of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) based out of MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and is co-PI of the Roybal Center for Behavior Change in Health at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
