Emily Oster

Emily Fair Oster completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 2006, work that included research on public-health puzzles such as the role of hepatitis B in China's sex ratio at birth. After her Ph.D., Oster held positions at the University of Chicago (including the Becker Center and Booth School) and became a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; she joined Brown University’s economics department, becoming a tenured professor and, since 2019, the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence. Her academic research covers development and health economics and methodological issues in causal inference and experimental design, and her early work drew wide attention (including a 2007 TED Talk). Oster translated her approach to health and risk into popular books aimed at parents — notably Expecting Better (pregnancy), Cribsheet (infant/toddler decisions), The Family Firm (household economics), and The Unexpected — which made her a New York Times–bestselling author and raised her public profile through media coverage in outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR. In 2020 Oster founded ParentData (formerly a newsletter and now a company) to aggregate evidence-based guidance for parenting and pregnancy; during the COVID-19 pandemic she created and helped run data tools such as the COVID School Data Hub / National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard to track school closures and reopening decisions.