Kacie Dragan received a joint B.A. in Sociology and Human Rights from Barnard College in 2014, and a Master of Public Health with a concentration in Research Methods from Columbia University in 2016. Prior to joining Harvard, Kacie spent three years with NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service where she served as the lead analyst and project manager of NYU’s Policies for Action research hub led by Sherry Glied and John Billings. There, Kacie used state Medicaid data to evaluate the effects of policies from non-health sectors — such as housing, transportation, and education — on the health of low-income New Yorkers, including evaluations of Universal Pre-Kindergarten and subsidized housing renovations. She has presented her work at numerous national health policy conferences and has been published in the Journal of Health Economics, Health Affairs, and NBER’s Working Paper series. She also previously worked at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in the emergency preparedness and epidemiology units, including as a co-author of the NYC Community Health Profiles that documented health, social, environmental, and economic conditions in each of NYC’s neighborhoods.
Kacie is primarily interested in examining policy levers that can operate at the intersection of health care and social services — especially across the housing, social safety net, and homeless services sectors — and the ways in which variations in Medicaid policy shape population health. She is also interested in methodological innovations that leverage large administrative datasets for health policy evaluation.
