Featured Researcher: Darrell Gaskin

Darrell Gaskin is a research associate in the NBER’s Health Economics Program. He is the William C. and Nancy F. Richardson Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he is director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions.

Gaskin’s research focuses on the role of race, poverty, and place in access to health care, use of health care, and health outcomes. This work explores disparities that affect a wide range of health concerns, including COVID-19, obesity, hypertension, mental health, and pain. Current projects include analyses of racial and geographic differences in the quality and use of health care and a randomized controlled trial aimed at improving hypertension control among low-income Black women.

In 2021, Gaskin was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He is a 2019 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He currently serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Health Advisers. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Society of Health Economists, after serving for 11 years on the Board of Directors of AcademyHealth.

Gaskin earned a BA from Brandeis University, an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in health economics from Johns Hopkins University.

Gaskin is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. For 32 years he has served as the pastor of the Beth Shalom A.M.E. Zion Church in Clinton, MD. In his spare time, he enjoys the theater, gospel, R&B and jazz concerts, and walking in a beautiful park while trying to hit a little white ball into 9 or 18 different small holes in the ground.