Joshua Graff Zivin is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Health Policy and Management and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he serves as the Director of the PhD Program in Sustainable Development. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2004-2005, he served as Senior Economist for Health and the Environment on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. His research spans three fields of economics - health, the environment, and international development- and focuses on how uncertainty and heterogeneity affect both individual and societal decision-making. Policy relevance serves as a guiding force behind all of this work.

He has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics in top economic, policy, and medical journals. He is currently engaged in two large and distinct projects. The first makes use of primary data collected over the past several years to examine the economic impacts of the AIDS crisis in Africa. The second relies on a unique, matched dataset to understand the role of institutions, social networks, and financial incentives in the production of new scientific knowledge within the life sciences.