Rate My Professor Jason Fletcher

Jason Fletcher is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with appointments in Applied Economics and Population Health Sciences. He earned a B.S. in economics and public administration from the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, graduating summa cum laude, and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 2010 to 2012, he served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at Columbia University. He directed the Center for Demography of Health and Aging at UW–Madison from 2018 to 2023 and the Wisconsin Research Data Center from 2018 to 2022.

Professor Fletcher specializes in health economics, economics of education, social genomics, and child and adolescent health policy. His research examines social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, integrates genetics with social science, assesses the long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and analyzes how in utero and early-life conditions influence later-life health, cognition, and mortality. He is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow for his work on U.S. mortality and received a career development award from the William T. Grant Foundation in 2012. His recent publications have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Health Economics, and Demography. He co-authored the book The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History and Our Future with Dalton Conley, published by Princeton University Press. He maintains affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute for the Study of Labor, the Institute for Research on Poverty, and other centers at UW–Madison.