Mustafa Hussein

He is also a faculty affiliate at 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, applied econometrics, social epidemiology, and urban health. His research examines drivers of social inequality in health, particularly the role of healthcare and economic policies, as well as contextual and psychosocial mechanisms, in shaping the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations in urban areas. His current research addresses health inequalities in three domains:(1) Urban economic policies and their effects on health and wellbeing in low-income populations: a current project seeks to estimate the effects of metropolitan living wage policies and local labor reforms (1996-2007) on health among low-wage workers, leveraging auspicious natural experiments in policy adoption in unique longitudinal datasets.(2) Contributions of healthcare organization and insurance policies to health inequalities and socioeconomic stratification: A current project models household financial risk due to medical out-of-pocket spending and assesses the protective potential of insurance policy reforms across US metro areas. Another analyzes the contributions of institutional features of national healthcare organization to socioeconomic inequalities in health across OECD healthcare systems.(3) Psychosocial mechanisms, such as chronic stress and psychological distress, underlying the high burden of cardiovascular disease and HIV/AIDS among low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations: these analyses employ causal mediation methods in longitudinal cohorts to generate credible, action-oriented insights about how reduction of these factors can help reduce health inequalities. This work also informs the direct policy analyses above by identifying health outcomes and mechanistic pathways that may be particularly relevant and sensitive to policy change.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 applied econometric analysis of public policies and comparative healthcare systems.