Penn Medical Ethics and Health Policy | Atheendar Venkataramani

Titles:
Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy
Associate Professor of Medicine
Director of the Opportunity for Health Lab

Education:
Duke University, BS
Yale University, M.Phil
Yale University, PhD
Washington University in St. Louis, MD

Atheendar Venkataramani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and a staff physician at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. In addition, he serves as Director of the Opportunity for Health Lab.

Dr. Venkataramani is a health economist who studies the life-course origins of health and socioeconomic inequality. His current research focuses on elucidating the effects of early life interventions on adult health and well-being; understanding the relationship between economic opportunities and health behaviors and outcomes; and examining the spillover health impacts of social policies. This work spans both domestic and international settings. Dr. Venkataramani completed his MD at Washington University, his PhD in Health Policy (Economics) and Yale University, and his BS in Biology and Economics at Duke University. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine - Global Primary Care at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

 Selected Publications

2019 PLOS Medicine Atheendar S. Venkataramani, Erin Cook, Rourke L. O’Brien, Ichiro Kawachi, Anupam B. Jena, and Alexander C. Tsai

College Affirmative Action Bans and Smoking and Alcohol Use Among Underrepresented Minority Adolescents in the United States: A Difference-in-Differences Study

2018 Journal of General Internal Medicine Atheendar S. Venkataramani, MD, PhD; Paula Chatterjee, MD, MPH

Early Medicaid Expansions and Drug Overdose Mortality in the USA: a Quasi-experimental Analysis

2018 JAMA Pediatrics Venkataramani M, Pollack CE, DeCamp LR, Leifheit KM, Berger ZD, Venkataramani AS

Association of Maternal Eligibility for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program With Citizen Children's Participation in the Women, Infants, and Children Program.

2018 JAMA Venkataramani AS, Gandhavadi M, Jena AB

Association Between Playing American Football in the National Football League and Long-term Mortality.

2017 Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) O'Brien RL, Venkataramani AS, Tsai AC

Economic Mobility and the Mortality Crisis Among US Middle-aged Whites.

2016 BMJ (Clinical research ed.) Venkataramani AS, Bor J, Jena AB

Regression discontinuity designs in healthcare research.

2017 The New England journal of medicine Venkataramani AS, Tsai AC

Dreams Deferred - The Public Health Consequences of Rescinding DACA.

2017 The Lancet. Public health Venkataramani AS, Shah SJ, O'Brien R, Kawachi I, Tsai AC

Health consequences of the US Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration programme: a quasi-experimental study.

2016 American journal of public health Venkataramani AS, Chatterjee P, Kawachi I, Tsai AC

Economic Opportunity, Health Behaviors, and Mortality in the United States.

2017 BMC public health Maughan-Brown B, Venkataramani AS

Accuracy and determinants of perceived HIV risk among young women in South Africa.

2015 Social science and medicine Tsai AC, Venkataramani AS

Communal bereavement and resilience in the aftermath of a terrorist event: Evidence from a natural experiment.

2012 Journal of health economics Venkataramani AS

Early life exposure to malaria and cognition in adulthood: evidence from Mexico.

 News & Research

June 18, 2019

College Affirmative Action Bans Linked to Higher Rates of Smoking Among Minority Youth

Banning the use of affirmative action in college admissions can harm the health of minority high school students, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine suggests. The study, published in PLOS Medicine, found that in states with a ban, smoking among black, Hispanic, and Native American high school students increased nearly 4 percent after those bans were put into place. Some students continued smoking for years into adulthood. But the bans had no significant effect on white students’ behaviors, the study found. “Educational policies can have these unintended health consequences,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of health policy at Penn. “Social policies really matter for health, and it’s worth talking about.”

Don't Blame Obamacare for the Opioid Crisis: Study

"A look at past expansions to Medicaid appears to challenge claims that expansion under Obamacare helped fuel the current opioid crisis in the United States. University of Pennsylvania researchers report that Medicaid expansions actually had the opposite effect, and led to reductions in drug overdose deaths."

Read More

July 9, 2018 | The Washington Post

This is How Police Killings Affect Black Mental Health

“Nothing will happen to the Police in the Freddie Gray case . . . ” a man tweeted three days after the death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man whose fatal spinal injury while in police custody in 2015 triggered protests throughout the nation. These sentiments — perception of a systemic unfairness and a loss of faith in institutions — are common among black people in the days and months following police killings of unarmed African Americans, according to a study published last month in the medical journal the Lancet. The report analyzed data collected between 2013 and 2016 from 103,710 black adults, finding the incidents to be detrimental to the psyche, adding 1.7 days of poor mental health annually per person. The study also analyzed white Americans’ self-reported mentality after all police killings (of white and black people), determining that “mental health impacts were not observed.”

Read More

June 24, 2018 | NPR

How Police Killings Lead To Poor Mental Health In The Black Community

A recent study published in The Lancet Medical journal shows that police killings of unarmed black men leads to poor mental. NPR's Michel Martin talks with study co-author Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani.

Read More

May 31, 2018 | Reuters

DACA program tied to health of U.S.-citizen kids

The U.S. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, has spillover benefits for the health of the young children of DACA-eligible mothers, a recent study suggests. Researchers found that after DACA was implemented, there was a surge in enrollment of these U.S.-born kids aged 5 and younger in the national Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefit program.

Read More

February 7, 2018 | STAT News

Far from being forgotten, the NFL’s ‘replacement players’ may help make football safer

There is considerable interest in this topic. The main concern is that injuries to the brain may shorten the lives of NFL players. Lifestyle choices, such as substance use (either during or after a player’s career), and the loss of purpose that can come after early retirement, are other factors that may also raise the risk of early death.

Do Pro Football Players Have a Higher Risk of Dying Earlier?

As fans across the country anticipate Sunday’s big game, a new study finds that career NFL players have a 38 percent higher risk of dying younger compared with those who played in only a few games. The mortality rate difference was statistically insignificant, but still raises key questions. The results are “suggestive but not definitive,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, and lead author on the study.

Read More

October 18, 2017 | Knowledge @Wharton

Atheen Venkataramani talks with Knowledge@Wharton

Listen to Atheen Venkataramani and Alex Tsai of Harvard Medical School discuss the impact of the DACA repeal on public health.

Read More

September 14, 2017 | HEALTH Policy$ense

Dreams Revived? The Public Health Case for DACA

In an inspiring perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine, new LDI Senior Fellow Atheendar Venkataramani and Alexander Tsai of Harvard explain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and urge medical and public health professionals to counter the threat posed by the program’s rescission.

Dreams Deferred — The Public Health Consequences of Rescinding DACA

The DACA program in many ways reflects the American ideal: people who first came to the United States as children were given a chance to pursue the American dream.

Read More

See All News