Dr. Finkelstein is an Associate Research Professor in the Duke Global Health Institute at Duke University and Deputy Director and Associate Professor in the Health Services Research Program at Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore.
Prior to his appointment at Duke, Dr. Finkelstein was a Senior Research Economist for the Public Health Economics Program at RTI (Research Triangle Institute.) At RTI, he focused his studies on “the economic causes and consequences of health behaviors with a primary emphasis on behaviors related to obesity.” Before beginning his career at RTI, Dr. Finkelstein was a research scientist and a fellow of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research at the University of Washington Department of Family Medicine. He earned his MHA, his Ph.D., and his MA in economics from the University of Washington.
Dr. Finkelstein’s expertise is in health economics, obesity, and cost-effectiveness analysis. He has been the leader of several projects for the research benefit of public and private sector agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some of these studies concerned the “causes and consequences of obesity,” which involved the evaluation of various obesity prevention programs. His work has been published in numerous academic journals. One of his papers, “National Medial Expenditures Attributable to Overweight and Obesity,” received media attention across the nation after being published in Health Affairs. He recently published a book in collaboration with L. Zuckerman entitled, The Fattening of America: How the economy makes us fat, if it matters, and what to do about it.
Dr. Finkelstein currently holds the position of both co-principal investigator and associate director for the RTI-University of North Carolina Center of Excellence in Health Promotion Economics.