Two Students Receive Inaugural Leonard Schaeffer RAND-USC Initiative Fellowships

August 24, 2015 &mdash

The Leonard Schaeffer RAND-USC Initiative in Health Policy and Economics is pleased to announce that two Ph.D. candidates in policy analysis, Dan Han and Ujwal Kharel, are the recipients of the inaugural fellowships for Pardee RAND Graduate School students. The fellowship will provide $20,000 in funding for the duration of 1 year starting September 1, 2015.

The fellowship is to be used for a collaborative research project between a Pardee RAND doctoral candidate and a Schaeffer Center faculty member with the goal of generating future grant proposals.

Dan Han (cohort '13) will be working with John Romley, associate professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California and an economist at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, on a project investigating the relationship between hospital nurse staffing and quality of care.

Ujwal Kharel (cohort '11) will be working with Seth Seabury, Associate Professor of Research at the Keck School of Medicine and a Fellow in the Schaeffer Center, on a project examining global trends for occupational injury rates.

The Leonard Schaeffer RAND-USC Initiative is supported by a gift from Leonard Schaeffer and funding from RAND Health and USC. The purpose of the initiative is to build stronger ties between RAND and the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. The initiative is supporting the development of joint proposals, projects, mentoring, and seminars. The Director of the initiative is Neeraj Sood, who is also the Director of Research at the Schaeffer Center, a former RAND staff member, and Pardee RAND alumnus.