I am a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) as a member of the Behavioral and Health Genomics Center, working with Patrick Turley and others in the Social Science Genomics space.

My current research interests include topics in statistical genetics, applied microeconomics, and health economics with active projects exploring statistical genomics and the economics of mental health.  I am very interested in the roles that technological innovations and policy play in these areas. 

Former projects include exploring the economics of mental health using big data from online health provider platforms, where I estimate the impacts of physician quality on patient outcomes. Other projects I have in the pipeline explore the perceptual models that individuals use when making decisions.  In 2017, while in graduate school, I founded Hivemind Analytics, LLC, which was conceived to execute on these ideas as part of my dissertation research. We derived and estimated parameters for individual-level conditional expectation functions related to a given individual’s implied objective function. We estimated these using rich expectations data from prediction tournaments we ran using software we developed. These model estimates allowed us to explore the roles that bias and uncertainty play across a variety of choice domains. I hope to revive this line of research and resume development of tools which I believe can improve the quality of decision-making at the individual and group level. 

I am also a founder and served as co-director of the Health Education Action Lab (HEAL, est. 2019), which was housed at Southern Utah University. I was really happy to be part of building HEAL.

The mission of of HEAL was to provide students with opportunities for experiential learning by getting involved in contributing to research on the frontier of knowledge. Faculty mentors were paired with students based on research interests. We gathered weekly for a trainings on research methods (e.g. research design, statistical programming, writing, etc.).

Among the most meaningful projects I served as principle investigator on at the HEAL lab involved a partnership with a large online therapy platform and a group of mental health care providers to explore questions related to mental health, education and innovative technological solutions to problems society faces in these areas. One of my favorite parts of this time was getting to meet regularly with students on Wednesday evenings, sometimes with dinner, to crowd-storm on projects together for a longer period of time (2-3 hour sessions).

Meetings were structured after the weekly stand-up meetings that have become commonplace at firms in the private sector that follow the OKR/SCRUM and similar approaches to project management.  In Spring 2020, I helped design and teach two courses which were previously not offered at SUU: Econ 4900, which focused on applied research in the context of active HEAL projects, and Econ 4270 which covered advanced econometrics and focused primarily on causal inference in applied microeconomics. I’m proud of the work we did, which resulted not only in high quality research, but several top graduate school placements, including two who went to the University of Chicago, with one at Yale, and several who went on to successfully complete law school.  Myself and other HEAL mentors were also happy to see that the experience led to quite a few meaningful collaborations beyond economics, including the marriage of two of our research fellows (with a baby on the way at the time of this post). 

I’ve been fortunate to have some of my prior work with colleagues featured by various media outlets, including PBS News, Fortune,  National Public Radio (All Things Considered), The Washington Post, The Times (London), Yahoo!News and the The San Diego Union Tribune, among others.

My wife, Micquel, and I have three children: Hal (12 years), Lulu (10 years), and Maeby (7 years).  We enjoy building things with Lego bricks and making memories in beautiful spaces.  Feel free to email me: jeffswigert@gmail.com.