Jessica Cohen, PhD, is Bruce A. Beal, Robert L. Beal, and Alexander S. Beal Associate Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research applies the methods of program design, randomized trials, and impact evaluation to maternal and child health programs and policies in sub-Saharan Africa and US. She has worked on a number of randomized controlled trials in Africa related to prevention, treatment and diagnosis of malaria, technology adoption, messaging and behavior change and pharmaceutical supply chains. Ongoing work in malaria explores how perceptions of malaria risk influence malaria treatment seeking and prevention. Professor Cohen has led a number of studies in maternal and newborn health, including field work in Kenya using behavioral economic insights to explore new approaches to increasing demand for high quality maternal care. She has other ongoing field work applying behavioral economic findings to improve program design in the areas of postpartum contraception in Kenya and in Kansas and nutrition in Ethiopia. She is co-editor with William Easterly of the book “What Works in Development?: Thinking Big and Thinking Small.” She is also the co-founder of Together Against Malaria (TAMTAM) Africa, Inc., a non-profit organization established in 2003 in East Africa working on malaria prevention among pregnant women.

Her work has been been published widely in top economics and public health journals and has been referenced in major national and international publications, including The Economist, Boston Globe, New York Times, and Nature. She was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Malaria Programme’s Technical Expert Group on Surveillance, Monitoring, and Evaluation, has advised the government of Zanzibar on its malaria control program and the Canadian International Development Agency on its child survival programs. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Wesleyan University and was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics.