Haas Family endows CHIBE’s Founders Professorship of Population Health

CHIBE is grateful to the Haas family for establishing the first CHIBE-based endowed Chair, the Founders Professorship of Population Health. CHIBE is pleased to announce that Dr. Harsha Thirumurthy is the inaugural chair.

The Haas family asked Dr. Kevin Volpp, the Ralph and Beth Johnston Muller Director of CHIBE, to name this Chair after someone who has had a profound impact at Penn and has supported his professional development, and to him Dr. David Asch was the clear answer.

“I am very grateful to Janet and John Haas for giving us the opportunity to honor someone who has given so much to the Penn community and helped establish our national leadership in health policy and research in behavioral science and health. David has had a number of important leadership roles at Penn ranging from being Executive Director of LDI to leading the VA Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion and the Penn Center for Health Care Innovation. He has mentored dozens of trainees and junior faculty who have gone on to have significant impacts both within and outside of academia,” Dr. Volpp said.

CHIBE spoke with Dr. Thirumurthy about how he feels about this honor, what work needs to be done to improve population health, and his connection to Dr. David Asch, whom this professorship will eventually be named after.

What does it mean to you to be chosen by the Haas family for this endowed chair?

It’s an incredible honor to be chosen by the Haas family for this endowed chair in population health. I’ve long admired the passion and generosity the Haas family has shown across causes from education to public health to conservation, and their longstanding engagement with Penn is something I’ve been very grateful for. It means a great deal that they are endorsing and supporting the kind of work I’ve been doing for over 20 years at the intersection of economics and health — much of it in parts of the world where living standards are far below those in the US and where resources for improving population health are far more limited. 

This professorship will eventually be renamed after Dr. David Asch –  What is your connection to Dr. Asch?

I met David soon after arriving at Penn in 2017 and was immediately struck by his accessibility and by the applied, impactful work he’s done in medicine and public health. He’s always made time for advice and guidance — from my early years at Penn, when I was developing the initial ideas for a behavioral science research initiative in South Africa partly inspired by his work on the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, to now, as I do more work on non-communicable diseases in the Global South. I’ve long admired David’s applied research, his gift for communicating research findings to non-specialist audiences, and his leadership of initiatives like the Nudge Unit and the Way to Health platform. He’s been an inspiration throughout my career. 

Thinking about population health, what populations do you focus on in your work and what do you think needs to be done to improve their health?

I’ve focused on Africa and South Asia since early in my career — two regions I’ve had a strong connection to for a long time. In the early 2000s, I became interested in studying how infectious diseases like HIV affect the health and well-being of entire populations in East Africa, aiming to generate evidence useful for resource allocation decisions facing governments and funders.

Living in Kenya for nearly two years during my dissertation research deepened my belief in doing work that focuses on the health of entire populations – not just those we see coming through a health system but also those at the margins who lack the resources and opportunities to achieve good health. 

My research has approached this challenge from two angles.

First, what can health systems do to lower the barriers low-income households face in accessing lifesaving care? Across many studies, my collaborators and I have shown the value of reducing cost-sharing, using incentives, leveraging social networks, and bringing services closer to people.

Second, how do we address the upstream factors that shape health long before someone needs care? Our work points to policies addressing social determinants of health — like cash transfers to alleviate poverty and expanded access to financial services for the poor — as bold measures that societies should be considering. Such policies can improve overall economic well-being and also result in healthier populations.