The Returns-on-Investment in Public Health
Timothy Brown, Professor
Public Health
Applications for Fall 2025 are closed for this project.
A growing literature in recent years has documented the economic returns-on-investment (ROI) in public health, but there is low public awareness of these results. This literature includes estimation of spending offsets when public health prevents the need for costly curative health care, as benefiting both private healthcare payers and government budgets. This article will review research to date estimating net ROI of public health program expenditures, from both government and societal perspectives, and highlight priority areas for future research to better understand net cost-benefit trade-offs in public health.
Role: Undergraduate students will be engaged in the use of AI to do massive literature searches and review, engage in discussions around how to write a review article to focus on important findings and policy implications, and will help to write the review article. This article must be submitted for publication by June 1, 2026.
Learning outcome will be hands-on experiences of learning how to conceptualize, conduct, and publish a review article and synthesize important findings for wide audience using a pre-specified AI protocol.
Qualifications: Public health students preferred, but students of any major are welcome to apply.
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: All meetings will be on-campus (or via Zoom).
Related website: https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/people/timothy-brown
Biological & Health Sciences