ABOUT DEB
Debra Sabatini Dwyer earned her masters and doctor of philosophy from Cornell University in Health, Labor, and Public economics in 1996. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Center for Policy Research in the Maxwell School for Public Policy at Syracuse University. She has worked as an economic researcher for the Social Security Administration in Washington DC. Dr. Dwyer has spent the last twenty years at Stony Brook University where she has taught economics, public policy, research methods, program evaluation, general micro and macro economics, and teaching methods to undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences (economics and political science), The School of Health Technology and Management (Chair, Department of Health Care Policy and Management), and the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Department of Technology and Society). She has had affiliations with College of Business where she helped to design the Masters in Business Management (MBA) in Health Care Management, and in public health where she created a dual degree PhD in economics and MS in public health. She has served on several University Senate administrative committees and has served as an assistant dean for strategic and academic planning in the College of Arts and Sciences. Her areas of expertise are primarily grounded in health and labor economics, but given her experience across a variety of disciplines, supervising dissertations across those disciplines, she has developed expertise in general policy analysis. Dr. Dwyer is currently developing innovative curriculum for teaching economics, policy analysis, and data analysis for public policy online. She has dozens of peer reviewed publications that inform primarily health and labor policy. Besides her work as a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University, Dr. Dwyer has served as an expert economic consultant, primarily in labor law cases, but also as policy adviser and special economic projects (For example Thomas Reuters LLP). More recently Dr. Dwyer, with Xu Zhang (Farmingdale State College, College of Business) and Amin Hernandez (FinTech Corporation), has developed a program for delivering financial literacy education to vulnerable young people in Suffolk County New York.
WHAT WE DO
Dr. Dwyer uses her expertise as an economist and policy analyst to inform policies in the areas of health care reform and national public health matters, education reform and workforce development, loss and damages analysis, and criminal justice reform. As an interdisciplinary applied economist Dr. Dwyer has experience engaging in positive economics to meet normative goals. She has a particular interest in improving social justice and minimizing inequity as a vehicle to a more productive and efficient economy.