Charles E. Phelps, PhD

Charles E. Phelps, PhD, is University Professor and Provost Emeritus of the University of Rochester.

He began his research career at the RAND Corporation in 1971, and helped found the RAND Health Insurance Study, a large randomized controlled trial assessing the medical use and health outcomes arising from different health insurance coverage; he also served as director of RAND’s Program on Regulatory Policies and Institutions. He joined the University of Rochester (UR) in 1984, holding appointments in the departments of Economics and Political Science, and serving as director of the Public Policy Analysis Program and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine (now the Department of Public Health Sciences) in UR’s School of Medicine and Dentistry. In 1994, he became Provost (Chief Academic Officer) at UR, a position he held for 13 years.

The author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles covering the fields of health economics, health policy, medical decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis of various medical interventions and related topics, Phelps also wrote a leading textbook in the field, Health Economics, now in its sixth edition, and four other books: Eight Questions You Should Ask About Our Health Care System (Even if the Answers Make You Sick), from the Hoover Institution Press (2010); The Economics of US Healthcare Policy, with Steven Parente, PhD, from Routledge Press (2017; Making Better Choices: Designs, Decisions and Democracy, with Guru Madhavan, PhD (2021) and Valuing Health: The Generalized, Risk-Adjusted Cost Effectiveness (GRACE) Model, with Darius Lakdawalla, PhD (2024), both published by the Oxford University Press.

He has served on the boards of the Council of Library and Information Resources, the Center for Research Libraries, VirtualScopics Inc. and Health Care Cost Institute. He has consulted for the Office of Health Economics in the U.K, various biopharmaceutical companies, and EntityRisk, Inc, a health economics consulting firm. He has testified before congressional committees on health policy and intellectual property issues on behalf of the Association of American Universities and other higher education organizations and served on three Institute of Medicine committees to develop new approaches for prioritizing vaccine development and use.

He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences) in 1991. In 2019, Phelps received the Victor R. Fuchs Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Health Economics from the American Society of Health Economists. In 2023, he received the Avedis Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award from ISPOR—The Leading Global Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research. He is the only person ever to have received all three of these honors.

Phelps received a BA in mathematics from Pomona College and a PhD in Business Economics from the University of Chicago. Current CV available at http://tinyurl.com/Charles-E-Phelps-CV.