Miriam Laugesen, Ph.D.

Miriam Laugesen is a tenured Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, where she teaches health policy, politics and public health leadership. She leads two graduate certificates in Health Policy Analysis, and Health Policy and Practice. Dr. Laugesen’s research explores health care costs and access in relation to physician payment and health systems’ balance between primary and specialty care. Her 2016 book Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians are Paid (Harvard University Press) unpacked the inner workings of Medicare payment policy. Dr. Laugesen’s research informed recent National Academy of Medicine committee recommendations on primary care and nursing, while her work on international physician fees (with Sherry Glied) has helped frame new conversations on health care costs, primary and specialty care in the United States.

A former Fulbright fellow and Tow Faculty Scholar, Dr. Laugesen received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award, a Provost Leadership Fellowship from Columbia University, and a 2023 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship for research in Japan. Dr. Laugesen previously served on AcademyHealth’s Education Council and is past president of the American Political Science Association’s Health Politics and Policy Section. She was book review editor for the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law from 2017 to 2023.

Dr. Laugesen was born in the Punjab and raised in India and New Zealand. She received a First-Class Honours degree in Politics and Public Administration from Victoria University of Wellington and a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia. She completed graduate work in health policy at Harvard University and postdoctoral training in health services research at RAND-UCLA.