Ross A. Hammond

Ross A. Hammond is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy. His primary area of expertise is using advanced computational modeling to find practical and effective solutions to pressing policy challenges. His current research topics include chronic disease prevention, obesity, tobacco control, implementation science, food systems and food security, developmental and neurobiological approaches to food choice, social norms and social contagion, physical activity, behavioral epidemiology, and methods to advance utility of computational approaches as policy tools.

Hammond received his B.A. from Williams College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has authored numerous scientific articles in journals such as Lancet, JAMA Pediatrics, PNAS, American Journal of Public Health, Evolution, and Journal of Conflict Resolution, and his work has been featured in New Scientist, Salon, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, and major news media. Hammond has served in numerous federal policy advisory roles including as an HHS-appointed advisory council member at NIH, an advisory Special Government Employee at the FDA Center for Tobacco Products, co-lead of a commissioned report for the U.S. Department of Agriculture on U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and as a member of the Food and Nutrition Board at the National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering. He also holds academic appointments at Harvard School of Public Health, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Brown School at Washington University in St Louis.

Hammond is on the editorial board of the journals Behavioral Science & Policy and Childhood Obesity and has been a member of four NIH-funded research networks using complex systems science, covering infectious disease, tobacco control, obesity, and population health. He has contributed to multiple National Academy of Sciences reports, including one approaching the U.S. food system from a complex systems perspective and one focused on the use of agent-based models to inform tobacco policy. He has been a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Institutes of Health, and has taught computational modeling at Harvard School of Public Health, the University of Michigan, Washington University, Drexel University, the National Cancer Institute, and the NIH/CDC Institute on Systems Science and Health.

He has previously held positions as the Okun-Model Fellow in Economics, an NSF Fellow in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at University of Michigan, a visiting scholar at The Santa Fe Institute, and a Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.