Caulkins Receives RWJF Investigator Award

Jonathan Caulkins, Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy, is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Award in Health Policy Research.  This highly competitive program was created in 1992 to encourage innovation in addressing pressing health care issues.

America's drug problem is more severe than that of any other developed country.  Caulkin's project "Synthesizing Lessons for Drug Policy and Policy Research" will offer a fresh, dynamic approach that offers practical steps to confront the problem.

Caulkins' research focuses on modeling and analyzing problems pertaining to drugs, crime, and violence, and how policies affect those problems. A common theme is assessing the cost-effectiveness of various broad categories of drug and violence control interventions, such as incarceration and prevention, both in absolute terms and relative to each other. He has a particular interest in applications of optimal dynamic control theory and has also published on software quality, airline operations, pollution trading markets, internet-based advertising, flexible manufacturing systems, and personnel performance evaluation, among other topics.