Lab Members

Khadijah Bland is a second-year PhD student at University of Rochester in the Health Services Research and Policy program. Her research interests include maternal health, hospital utilization patterns, and health outcomes.

Suiyue Cui is a fourth-year PhD student in the Health Services Research and Policy program. Her research focuses on examining how the opioid crisis affects different geographic areas and populations through health services research and systems science methods. She is also interested in disaster preparedness and risk communication.

Joshua Daniels is a graduate from the University of Rochester where he received his bachelors in Economics and Mathematics. His research interests include environmental, health, and labor economics.

Emily Gherghel is a PhD student and physical therapist by training. Her research interests include health policy, with a focus on using causal inference methods to understand how policies translate into real-world changes in care delivery and outcomes.

Daniel Guth is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Rochester Medical Center. He is a health economist whose research interests include applied microeconomics and environmental economics.

Claire Herrman-Moran is an RN with a Masters in Public Health. She has worked in epidemiology, vaccinology, and helped respond to the opiate epidemic in Monroe County. After helping in COVID-19 response traveling in Texas, she returned to school where she is currently a PhD student in the Health Services Research and Policy program. Her research interest centers on climate change hazards' effect on health with a particular focus on heat, disaster preparedness, mitigation and response.

Sohrab Jaferian completed a Master’s degree in Data Science at the University of Rochester in 2023. He is currently a research assistant at HEEL and will join the University of Rochester as a PhD student in Translational Biomedical Science (Computer Science Track) in the 2025 cohort. Sohrab focuses on leveraging electronic health records (EHR) and advanced statistical and machine learning models to study health outcomes related to COVID-19, vaccination, air quality, and pregnancy. He joined HEEL to gain hands-on research experience applying data-driven methods to improve public health outcomes and to enjoy an ideal environment for deepening his research skills and preparing for his upcoming PhD.

Konstantin Kunze is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Rochester interested in labor, health, and public economics. Specifically, he studies policies that impact disadvantaged populations and racial inequalities. His current research analyzes the effects of access to social safety net programs, the opioid epidemic, and racial discrimination on various outcomes.

Deniz Naghibi is a PhD candidate in the Health Services Research and Policy program at the University of Rochester. Her research interests include health outcome disparities, the opioid epidemic, and advanced health research methodology.

Syd Pargman is a predoctoral research assistant at the University of Rochester. He is passionate about applied microeconomics, and is interested in researching topics related to healthcare, education, and immigration. Syd graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in Economics in May 2024

Aniket Patil is a Predoctoral Research Associate interested in applied microeconomics. He is currently interested in health policy and studying the opioid epidemic. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Economics.

Isaiah Sheth is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Rochester Health and Environmental Economics Lab. His primary research fields are environmental and health economics. Isaiah is particularly interested in understanding climate change as a public health crisis and estimating health effects of pollution to provide valuations of pollution abatement as an input into policy.

Alexander Torbuck is a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Rochester in the Health Services Research and Policy program. His interests are patient/provider behaviors, behavioral interventions, and opioid harm reduction measures.

Daiming Zhou is currently an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester double majoring in Data Science and Financial Economics. His research interests include computational social science and public health.

External Lab Members

Richard W DiSalvo is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Dr. DiSalvo studies applied microeconomics with a focus on public policy. His current policy interests are in drinking water policy, oil and gas development, and K-12 education. As part of Dr. Hill's team, he is working on the environmental economics of domestic drilling and the link between drinking water contamination and health. He also supports the team by instructing undergraduate research assistants in data analysis. Dr. DiSalvo received his Ph.D in Economics from University of Rochester in 2019. Learn more about Richard's work.

Naima Farah is a Post-Doctoral Research Economist at Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Research Center and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. Dr. Farah’s primary research fields are energy, natural resource, and environmental economics. She has published work on endangered species, open access renewable resource extraction, and on water quality control. Her current work focuses on externalities related to unconventional oil and gas production (hydraulic fracturing) and food-energy-water nexus. She has been working with Dr. Hill and her research team on the effects of power plants on local housing market in the age of decreased coal use and increased natural gas use by the power plants. Dr. Farah received her Ph.D in Economics from University of Calgary in 2017.

Max Harleman is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration at Georgia College and State University. His research focuses on the governance of energy and industrial infrastructure projects, and how they impact the well-being of nearby communities. His previous and ongoing projects have explored how abandoned oil and gas wells affect real estate investment, how natural gas tax revenues affect local public finances, and how the construction of high-voltage lines to expand renewable transmission affects neighboring property values. Dr. Harleman holds a PhD in Public and International Affairs and a Master of Public Administration from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, serving as an institutional development volunteer in Grenada between 2013 and 2015.

Lala Ma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics in the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Ma’s primary research field is environmental economics with a focus on non-market valuation. Her work deals with estimating the values placed on improving environmental quality using a combination of reduced-form and structural methods. Specifically, she has worked on projects to recover the value of brownfield remediation, of flood risk changes, and, more recently in collaboration with Dr. Hill, of mitigating the health and environmental costs of shale gas development. Dr. Ma received her Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University in 2014.

Ethan Sawyer is a Predoctoral Research Professional with Becker Friedman Institute at The University of Chicago working with Evan Rose. His interests are in labor, education, and crime economics.

Mary Willis is a PhD candidate in Environmental and Occupation Health in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University. Mary earned her MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Rochester in 2016, where Dr. Hill supervised her thesis on shale gas development and pediatric asthma. Mary’s dissertation research examines the perinatal health impacts of in utero exposure to emissions from the energy sector (e.g. shale gas development, power plants, vehicle traffic) using spatial exposure assessment and causal inference methods. She was recently awarded an F31 National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to pursue this work. Learn more about Mary’s work.