John A
- Research Program Mentor

PhD candidate at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)

Expertise

Economics of the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industries; Drug Pricing; Competition studies in Healthcare Markets; Determinants of Health; Theory of Healthcare and Health; Entrepreneurship/Business

Bio

My name is John Anagnost, and I am a 4th year PhD student in Health Policy and Management at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). My general interests are related to Pharmaceutical and Health Economics. The healthcare industry is a broad and dynamic ecosystem in which individuals often have conflicting ideas about how to make it better with respect to quality, access, and cost. I am fascinated in ways of thinking about public health problems from the perspective of economic theory. Specifically, I am interested in regulatory and market dynamics that influence behavior of participants within the ecosystem. Nonetheless, I am also interested in areas that are not specific to healthcare such as antitrust, competition, and labor markets. When I am not focusing on my studies, I enjoy all that Los Angeles has to offer, mostly the beaches, diverse food, and sports.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Healthcare Research Project with Statistics and Data

We will first examine the broad and diverse definitions of "health". Subsequently, we will explore decision making with respect to health from economic, critical, and social theories; who should be responsible for financing the provision of healthcare; and what tradeoffs exists among different modes of healthcare financing systems. At this stage, the project is more philosophical and theoretical in which I want the student to wrestle with these topics and come to their own opinion about health and the financing and provision of healthcare with me as guide they can lean on for assistance and facilitation of critical problem solving. Once the student understands theoretical frameworks as they relate to these topics, I would like to introduce different methods and statistical analyses used to understand the relationship between predictor variables and health outcome variables. I will go over basic research methodology, biostatics, and coding. In the third stage of the project, the student will come up with a research question and hypothesis and we will use a publicly available health data set to test that hypothesis.

Coding skills

Stata, R, Excel

Teaching experience

I have tutored students privately on a wide range of topics spanning topics such as standardized test taking and English literature. Additionally, I was a employed tutor on Varsity Tutors roughly 2 years ago in which I taught mostly high school and college students on mathematics and economics. Recently, I TA'd 2 quarters of undergraduate microeconomics at UCLA.