Affiliated Faculty and Research Associates

• Andrew Young School Affiliates
• Georgia State University Affiliates

Andrew Young School Affiliates

Gary Henry, Professor, Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies, Political Science and Educational Policy
Gary Henry is a professor of policy studies in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He previously served as the Director of Evaluation and Learning Services for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Henry has evaluated a variety of policies and program, including Pre-K and the HOPE Scholarship in Georgia as well as school reforms and accountability systems. He served as Director of the Applied Research Center. He is jointly appointed in the Department of Public Administration and Policy Studies and Department of Political Science at Georgia State University. Henry has been appointed to serve on the Institute of Education Sciences Education Systems and Broad Reform Scientific Review Panel. He has served on the Finance, Leadership, and Management panel since its inception. The author of Practical Sampling (Sage 1990), Graphing Data (Sage 1995) and co-author of Evaluation: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Guiding, and Improving Policies and Programs (Jossey-Bass 2000), Henry has also published extensively in the field of evaluation and policy analysis.

Karen Minyard, Director, Georgia Health Policy Center
Karen Minyard is an advocate for basic restructuring of local health care systems to focus on access to care and health status improvements. She serves as an officer on the founding board of the Community Health Leadership Network, a national partnership dedicated to helping communities achieve healthcare access, and has provided numerous consultations and presentations for groups and organizations that seek to build stronger health care systems. As director of the Georgia Health Policy Center, Minyard is charged with leading the policy, research, and technical assistance programs of the center. The program areas are concentrated in care at the end of life, child well-being, health philanthropy, rural health, and access to care for the uninsured.

Chris Parker, Senior Research Associate, Georgia Health Policy Center
Chris Parker joined the staff of the Georgia Health Policy Center in a consultative capacity, in May 2003, to facilitate work on a cancer related project that provided support and assistance to the Central Georgia Cancer Coalition as they planned for designation as a Regional Program of Excellence (RPE). His policy interests are reflected in the projects that he continues to be engaged in at the Center. These include the strengthening families through by strengthening parental relationships, examination of select Community Health Initiatives on behalf of the Commonwealth Fund, an assessment of the public health districts in Georgia and an examination of the issues surrounding health care coverage for the Uninsured. Chris is a graduate from the Rollins School of Public Health where he completed his MPH degree, focusing in Health Policy and Management in 2001. While there he authored and presented papers looking at: Prescription Drug Benefits for the Medicare population, Improving Access for the Uninsured, and the Prescription Practices of HMO Physicians. As a trained physician, he brings a wealth of significant clinical experiences having worked with underserved communities and faith based organizations in Kingston, Jamaica.

Mary Ann Phillips, Senior Research Associate, Georgia Health Policy Center
Mary Ann Phillips has been with the Health Policy Center since its inception in 1995. She has worked on a number of projects, including conducting research for the implementation of health insurance market reforms and health plan purchasing cooperatives in Georgia; managing a statewide effort to obtain provider and consumer input for reforming the state Medicaid system; and assisting with the development of Georgia's children's health insurance program, PeachCare for Kids. Before joining the Georgia Health Policy Center, she worked for the Governor's Commission on Health Care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Health Planning Branch of the U.S. Public Health Service.

Inas Rashad, Assistant Professor, Economics
Rashad is a NBER Faculty Research Fellow in the health economics program. Her current research pertaining to child health involves looking at the potential causal effect that advertising by fast-food restaurants might have on obesity in children and adolescents, and policy implications regarding corporate tax deductibility and restriction of fast-food advertising on television. In addition, she is focused on the possible effect that foods that have high glycemic indexes might have on the prevalence of Type II diabetes, once termed adult-onset diabetes but now afflicting numerous adolescents and even children. Rashad’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and she has written about childhood obesity in the Dallas Morning News.  Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Health Economics, Public Policy Research, the Public Interest, the Eastern Economic Journal, the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, and Gender Issues.

Dana Rickman, Senior Research Associate  
Dana Rickman is currently the Principal Investigator for The Georgia Prekindergarten Resource Coordinator (RC) Program Evaluation, which is a descriptive evaluation that examines the services provided by the RC Program and how these services are delivered to the students enrolled in Georgia’s Pre-K program. It also specifically examines the role of the RC Program in transitioning children into kindergarten. She is also the project manager for the North Caroline Disadvantaged Student Supplement Fund (DSSF) Pilot Program Evaluation. The Improving Opportunities to Lean: A Study of the DSSF pilot is a study coordinated by East Carolina University to provide an independent assessment of the effectiveness of the pilot program in each of the 16 participating counties. Rickman has previously been the project manager for the Georgia TANF Leavers Study, and an evaluation of Georgia’s Technical Assistance Program in Early Care and Education. She was also a member of the study team that conducted a multi-year evaluation of the Georgia Pre-k program.

Christine Roch, Associate Professor of Public Administration and Urban Studies
Roch conducts research in the areas of the areas of public policy, urban politics, and political participation. She is primarily interested in how citizens respond to incentives that are created by policy and institutions, and in the macro-level implications of their behavior for the design of policy and institutions. She also has a substantive interest in education policy. She has written articles examining how incentives created by changing the institutional arrangements of schools affect the behavior of parents. She has also written about the role of social networks as an intermediary between citizen and state in the context of tax reform. Most recently, she has conducted research on education finance reform in the states, as well as research on citizen satisfaction with the use of non-profits in the delivery of social services. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science.

Angie Snyder, Senior Research Associate, Georgia Health Policy Center
Angie holds a Master of Public Health degree from Tulane University and a Master of Philosophy from Yale University, where she also is a doctoral candidate in health policy with an epidemiology concentration. Angie spent more than six years as a public health adviser for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with assignments in Long Beach, Calif., New York City and New Orleans. Her work with the CDC’s National Immunization Program in Atlanta provided valuable experience in children’s health policy and removing barriers to ensure appropriate immunizations of children from birth to two years of age.

Erdal Tekin, Assistant Professor, Economics
Tekin's current research focuses on the effects of welfare reform on single mothers' child care, employment, and welfare decisions. His other interests include the economic determinants of juvenile crime, the demand for medical care in developing countries, and the determinants of child care subsidy receipt. His work has received funding from the Child Care Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is a research affiliate of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany.

Akilah Thomas, Research Associate, Georgia Health Policy Center
Akilah Thomas has been involved with the Building Strong Families Program since April 2004. She completed her Master of Public Health at Emory University in December 2000 and her Bachelors in Sociology at Clark Atlanta University in May 1999. Akilah initially began work with the Building Strong Families program by assisting in the planning stages.  The purpose of this work was assuring that the chosen curriculums were adaptable to the communities that Building Strong Families planned to serve. Akilah also assisted with the development of the Building Strong Families supplemental curriculum. Currently, Akilah is the Project Director for the Georgia Building Strong Families program which is operated out of Georgia State University’s Georgia Health Policy Center.  Prior to joining Building Strong Families, Akilah worked for ten years within Emory University’s School of Medicine and School of Public Health. For three of those years (2002 – 2005) she was the Senior Project Coordinator for the Centering Pregnancy Program and spent the remainder of her time at Emory working on various projects researching HIV/AIDS.

Eric Twombly, Associate Professor, Public Administration and Urban Studies
Twombly is a national expert on social service provision by community-based, nonprofit organizations and wage setting in the nonprofit sector. He has also written widely on the determinants of charitable giving in metropolitan areas, the fiscal capacity of nonprofits, and the ability of advocates to improve worker compensation in the child care industry. Focusing specifically on the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, he recently completed a multiyear assessment of child services and a study of the economic activity of the region’s nonprofit sector. Prior to joining the faculty of Georgia State University, Twombly was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. He received his doctorate in public policy from the George Washington University, where he also taught as an Assistant Professorial Lecturer in the School of Public Policy and Public Administration.

Mary Beth Walker, Associate Professor, Economics
Walker's research and teaching interests are in spatial econometrics and some semi-parametric estimation and testing. She has worked on applications in a variety of fields, including taxation issues, education, and health care utilization. In addition to her academic research, she has participated in some international public finance work and consulted for AT&T and Bell South. She has published numerous articles in such journals as Econometrica, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Urban Economics and the National Tax Journal.

Sally Wallace, Professor Economics
Wallace focuses her professional career on teaching, conducting research, and advising on fiscal policy and the interaction of demographic changes on government’s fiscal stance. Prior to her appointment at the Andrew Young School, she was a fiscal economist for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis (OTA), and specialized in the analysis of individual income tax and savings issues, pension plans, long-term health care financing, and employee benefits and compensation.   She has served as resident Chief-of-Party for the GSU Fiscal Reform Project in the Russian Federation (USAID funded) and as the co-director of the Jamaica Fiscal Reform Project (funded by the Jamaican Government and the Asian Development Bank). As Associate Director of the Fiscal Research Center she is responsible for overseeing publications of a wide range of public expenditure and revenue issues as well as advising the state of Georgia on fiscal matters. She worked as co-investigator and principle author on The Costs of Teen Pregnancy in Georgia, and is has focused recent research on short and long-run impacts of teen births and the impacts of public policies on those outcomes.

Mei Zhou, Research Associate, Georgia Health Policy Center
Zhou is a research associate at the Georgia Health Policy Center. Ms. Zhou is experienced with large data sets, especially Medicaid data analysis. The programs she has worked include the Long-Term Care Partnership project, the Evaluation of Georgia’ s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Evaluation of Bridge, the Evaluation of Georgia Oral Health Prevention Program, the Member and Provider Satisfaction Surveys for Georgia Medicaid and PeachCare Claims Services, the Georgia’s Foster Care System project, the State Coverage Initiatives and Modeling Premium Support project, the CAHPS  Surveys for Georgia’s PeachCare and Medicaid Programs, the Evaluation of Georgia’s Disease Management Program, and the Assessment of Metropolitan Atlanta’s Health Care Safety Net.

Georgia State University Affiliates

Christopher Henrich, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Prof. Henrich’s interests focus on contextual factors that influence children’s school adjustment. He is researching an array of factors - including neighborhood violence, parent involvement, peer groups and motivational orientation - and how they interact in influencing children’s academic and behavioral adjustment at school. He is particularly interested in school adjustment over key educational transitions (e.g., from preschool to elementary school, and from elementary school to middle school) and in at risk populations, such as children in poverty and/or with developmental disabilities. He has been working with colleagues at the Yale Center in Child Development and Social Policy on a national evaluation of the Schools of the 21st Century and he is also evaluating the 21st Century Community Learning Center after-school programs in Kansas City, MO. More information can be found on his website: www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpsy/faculty/henrich.htm.

Some of his recent publications include:

• Henrich, C.C., & Blackman-Jones, R. (2006) "Parent involvement in preschool," chapter in E. F. Zigler, W. Gilliam, and S. M. Jones, et al. (Eds.) A vision for universal preschool education, New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Henrich, C.C. (2004). "Head Start as a national laboratory," chapter in E.F. Zigler & S. Styfco (Eds.) The Head Start debates, Towson, MD: Brookes Publishing.
• Henrich, C.C., Ginicola, M.M., & Finn-Stevenson, M. (in press). The School of the 21st Century is making a difference: Findings from two research studies. New Haven, CT: YaleZiglerCenter in Child Development and Social Policy.

Gabriel P. Kuperminc, Associate Professor of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Dr. Kuperminc received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Virginia in 1994. His research program focuses on individual, family, school, and community factors that contribute to resilience among ethnic and cultural minority youth. His recent research on the experiences of Latino adolescents from immigrant families has found that recent immigrants differ from immigrants who arrived in the U.S. early in their lives in their use of parental and school resources to support school success. A key focus of his current work examines how young people’s family responsibilities contribute to academic achievement and psychosocial functioning.

He is currently working on research focused on identifying factors that help promote social adjustment and school success among immigrant Latino adolescents. The longitudinal study of 200 young adolescents and their families using questionnaire and ethnographic methods is enabling construction and examination of an ecological model of social adjustment and school success. This work is funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. More information can be found on his website: www2.gsu.edu/~wwwpsy/faculty/kuperminc.htm.

Some of his recent publications include:

• Jurkovic, G.J, Kuperminc, G.P., Sarac, T., & Weisshaar, D. (in press). "Role of filial responsibility in the post-war adjustment of Bosnian young adolescents," Journal of Emotional Abuse.
• Karcher, M. J., Kuperminc, G. P., Portwood, S. G., Sipe, C. L., & Taylor, A. S. (in press). "Mentoring programs: A typology to inform program development, research, and evaluation," Journal of Community Psychology.
• Kuperminc, G.P., and Brookmeyer, K.A. (in press). "Developmental psychopathology," In R. Ammerman (Ed.), Comprehensive Handbook of Personality and Psychopathology, Vol. III, Part 1, Chapter 8, New York: Wiley.
• Priel, B., Besser, A, Waniel, A., Yonas-Segal, M, and Kuperminc, G.P. (in press). "Interpersonal and intrapersonal processes in the formation of maternal representations in middle childhood: Review, new findings, and future directions," Israel Journal of Psychiatry.

Dr. William Custer, Associate Professor, Institute of Health Administration, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University
Dr. Custer's research has investigated a wide range of topics including the sources of health insurance coverage, employment-based health insurance, health plan cost management initiatives, and health insurance regulation. He has also conducted evaluations of health care delivery initiatives for the uninsured measuring outcomes and patent satisfaction. He serves as the Director of the Center for Health Services Research. 

Publications related to health care and families include:

• Custer, William S., and Pat Ketsche. "The Effect of Marginal Tax Rate on the Probability of Employment Based Insurance by Risk Group," Health Services Research, Vol. 35, No.1, Part II.
• Custer, William S., Charles Kahn and Tom Wildsmith. "The Role of Employment-Based Health Insurance in the American Health Care Financing System," Health Affairs.
• Custer, William S., Sajak K. Chattopadhyay, H. Irene Hall and Rebecca B. Wolf. "Sources of Health Insurance in the U.S.: Analysis of State Level Data and Implications for Public Health Programs," Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, Vol. 5, No. 3.