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 mechanisms of social inequalities in health, particularly the role of healthcare and economic policies, as well as contextual and psychosocial factors, in shaping the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations in urban areas. Most recently, his work has focused on: (1) Urban economic policies and their effects on health and wellbeing in low-income populations: a current project estimates the effects of metropolitan living wage policies and local labor reforms (1990s-2000s) on health among low-wage workers, leveraging quasi-experimental variation in policy adoption in epidemiologic cohort data. (2) Contributions of healthcare organization and insurance policies to health inequalities: A current project models household financial risk due to medical out-of-pocket spending and assesses the protective effects of US insurance policy reforms across local markets. Another project uses cross-national data to assess the contributions of institutional configurations of national healthcare systems to socioeconomic inequalities in health across OECD countries. (3) Psychosocial mechanisms, such as chronic stress and psychological distress, and their role in driving the high burden of cardiovascular disease and HIV/AIDS among low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations: this work employs decomposition and mediation methods in longitudinal cohorts to generate credible insights about how reduction of these factors can help reduce health inequalities. This work also identifies candidate mechanistic pathways that could be intervention/policy targets. Hussein’s research has been funded by the American Heart Association, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He was also a member of the RWJF-Scholar Strategy Network’s inaugural national cohort of Health Equity Scholars (2021-2022). Hussein mentors Master’s and PhD students in health policy and teaches graduate courses in health economics, comparative healthcare systems, and applied econometrics.