Ali Moghtaderi, PhD, MBA, recently became the newest assistant professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH) Department of Health Policy and Management. His research interests include healthcare and medical malpractice, how the Affordable Care Act has impacted the healthcare market, and patients' response to medical innovation.
“The Milken Institute SPH is conducting world-class research into health policy and health economics,” Moghtaderi said. “My research focuses on issues at the intersection of health policy and health economics, and I am delighted to be in close proximity with two of my health economics collaborators in the department, Avi Dor, PhD and Lorens Helmchen, PhD.”
Moghtaderi's current projects include research underway with Dor into immunization policy, including the impact of policy interventions on HPV vaccination and incidence of cervical cancer and how states’ vaccination exemption laws affect vaccination rates. He is currently the principal investigator on a project funded by the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute to investigate the role of Health Information Exchanges and the prevalence of repeated imaging studies. He is the co-principal investigator on three additional grants, two of which are with Dor.
The attention-getting publications that Moghtaderi has coauthored include a timely study investigating how medical malpractice reforms affect specific clinical decisions. He has also participated in the department’s Geiger Gibson projects, such as a recent one on how acts by Congress could impact community health center revenues.
That his route to health economics was anything but direct is something that Moghtaderi readily acknowledges. His facility with mathematics and physics earned him a spot at the Sharif University of Technology in a materials science engineering undergraduate program in Iran, where he grew up. While there, he discovered that he really liked the social sciences. This led him to earn his MBA at Mazandaran University of Science and Technology, which was where he discovered his affinity for economics.
His facility with economics is what ultimately brought Moghtaderi to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where he earned both his MA and PhD. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and a postdoctoral fellow at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Policy Research as a postdoctoral fellow.
By 2016, Moghtaderi was hired as an assistant research professor at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences with a joint appointment at the Milken Institute SPH.
The Health Policy and Management classes that Moghtaderi is teaching include PUBH 6340.10, Health Economics and Finance, and PUBH 6399.10, Cost-Benefit Analysis in Health Care. In the future, he will also be teaching a class on the basics of economics.
In his free time, Moghtaderi likes both playing and watching soccer. He is a serious fan of the Futbol Club Barcelona, and its biggest star, Lionel Messi. Moghtaderi says that his best student is his dog, Pepper, who is cute, energetic and eager to learn.