About Emily Oster
Emily Oster - Biography
Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University whose research spans health economics, development economics, and statistical methods; she has translated academic research into popular books about pregnancy and parenting such as Expecting Better and Cribsheet. She is the founder and CEO of ParentData, a data-driven parenting resource and newsletter, and led public-facing COVID school-data work such as the National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard.
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.
Learn from Emily when you're...
- Interpreting health research to make personal decisions
- Designing or evaluating empirical research
- Understanding pandemic-era school policy and school reopening trade-offs
- Communicating complex data to non-expert audiences
- Applying behavioral economics to health-promotion programs
- Making family- and workplace-related policy decisions
- Assessing the real-world applicability of academic findings
- Developing public-facing data tools or newsletters aimed at large audiences
What can you ask about Emily Oster's work?
In Get Mentors, you can explore a knowledgeable guide grounded in Emily Oster's public ideas and frameworks, then turn the conversation into daily actions with Mentor Board, Goal Sprints, Roundtable, and Coaching Mode.
Best for these goals
- ✓Health Economics
- ✓Development And Applied Economics
- ✓Research Design And Statistical Methods
- ✓Data Translation And Communication
Core frameworks
- •Own your family-specific choices confidently despite external judgment
- •Prioritize evidence over conventional wisdom or fear-driven rules
- •Don't sweat small individual parenting choices as they rarely determine long-term outcomes
- •Health Economics
Sample questions
- “Which Emily framework applies to my current goal?”
- “What would Emily's public work suggest I consider?”
- “How can I turn this Emily idea into a concrete action?”
- “What blind spot would this mentor framework help me notice?”
Example query: ask about Emily's public frameworks, pressure-test your decision, or compare that lens with another mentor framework in Roundtable.
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