About the Dean

Dana Goldman Bio

Dana Goldman is dean of the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, C. Erwin and Ione L. Piper Chair, and distinguished professor of pharmacy, public policy, and economics.  He is a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and research associate with the National Bureau for Economic Research.  For more than a decade, he has served as director (most recently, co-director) of the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, establishing it as one of the nation’s premier health policy research centers.  

Dean Goldman is also a nationally-recognized scholar.  He is the author of more than 300 articles in medicine, health policy, economics, and statistics; and his work has been cited more than 19,000 times according to Google Scholar. He pioneered a “Netflix model” to improve access to prescription drugs and the value of reduced copayments for the chronically ill.   He has served as a health policy advisor to the Congressional Budget Office, Covered California, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, and National Institutes of Health.  He served on the boards of ISPOR and ASHEcon and the editorial boards of Health Affairs and other journals.  His research and opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Stat, Forbes, Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, The Economist, NBC Nightly News, PBS NewsHour, CNN, NPR, and other media.  

Dean Goldman is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance.  In 2016, he was appointed a Distinguished Professor at USC in recognition of bringing the university “special renown.”  He is a past recipient of the USC Mellon Mentoring Award and several other teaching and research awards. 

Dean Goldman has been strongly committed to mentoring students and junior faculty throughout his career.  He was a founding director of USC’s Resource Center for Minority Aging Research funded by NIH.  The program aims to help increase the diversity and academic success of junior faculty.  Past trainees from this and other mentorship include faculty at Stanford, Harvard, Duke, UCLA, UCSF, World Bank, University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt.  He was a co-founder of Precision Health Economics—a consultancy that provided analytic services to pharmaceutical, biological and health care companies.  He currently serves as a scientific advisor to GRAIL and Biogen.  He also spent 15 years at the RAND Corporation, where he held the Distinguished Chair in Health Economics and served as director of its health economics program and the Bing Center.  

Dean Goldman received his B.A. summa cum laude from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.