Mustafa Hussein

He is also a faculty affiliate with the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (CIDR) and the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hussein's training spanned health economics, public policy analysis, econometrics and statistics, social epidemiology, and urban health. Hussein's research employs advanced quantitative methods to study the policy and institutional drivers of health inequalities in the healthcare system and labor markets as well as the contextual and psycho-biological mechanisms that link public policy and institutions to health. This work seeks to advance our understanding of the fundamental ways in which these drivers determine the social distribution of health and to identify and inform remedial interventions. In the last few years, Hussein’s research has focused on: 1) urban wage and labor reforms introduced across US cities in the 1990s and their effects on health and wellbeing among low-wage workers; 2) fine-tuned modeling of medical care economic risk due to out-of-pocket spending, its poverty consequences, and its response to insurance reforms; and 3) the contributions of chronic psychosocial stress to the high burden of cardiovascular disease and HIV/AIDS among low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations. In New York City, Hussein’s current work seeks to uncover the health and bio-psycho-social consequences of algorithmic management among low-wage, ‘gig’ workers. Hussein's research has been supported by the American Heart Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the US National Institutes of Health. He regularly mentors master's and PhD students and teaches graduate-level courses on health economics, comparative healthcare systems, and applied econometric and statistical methods.