Janet Currie Receives ASHEcon Award for Lifetime Contributions to Health Economics
The Victor R. Fuchs Award recognizes Currie’s decades of influential scholarship on child health, families, medical decision-making, and public policy.
Janet Currie, the David Swensen Professor of Economics at Yale University, has received the 2026 Victor R. Fuchs Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Health Economics from the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon).
The award is given annually to an economist who has made significant lifetime scholarly contributions to health economics. Currie will be recognized at the 15th Annual ASHEcon Conference, held June 7–10, 2026, in Minneapolis.
At Yale, Currie is helping lead a major new effort at the intersection of health economics and policy. Co-directed by Currie and Professor Zack Cooper, the Tobin-Cowles Health Economics & Policy Program will catalyze rigorous economic scholarship that can directly inform policy.
Currie is a pioneer in the economic analysis of child development. Across decades of research, she has examined how early-life conditions, public programs, environmental exposures, mental health care, and medical decision-making shape long-term outcomes. Her work has helped establish child health as a central subject in economics, showing how policies that support children and families can affect health, education, labor market outcomes, and economic opportunity over the life course.
Currie’s influence extends across the economics profession and beyond. She is co-director of the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), was the 2024 President of the American Economic Association, and has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy, among other honors.
That connection between research and policy continues to shape Currie’s work at Yale, including several recent studies and policy briefs on children’s health, mental health care, physician decision-making, and the systems that support families.
