Evan Anderson, JD, PhD

Dr. Evan Anderson is a public health law researcher. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods to describe how law and policy operate as structural determinants of health, and to identify how reform can promote wellness and equity. In this work, Dr. Anderson explores the use of law as an instrument of behavior change within public health governance. This includes defining and promoting methods for more effective collaboration between legal researchers and empirical health researchers. The interactive, open-access portal that Dr Anderson helped design, now hosts more than 100 datasets quantifying variation in health-related laws between states and over time. The other primary focus of Dr. Anderson’s research is evaluating efforts to create healthier drug and criminal justice policies.

Dr. Anderson is a passionate teacher. In his ten years at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), he taught foundational classes on health policy, public health law,  and social epidemiology.  He designed new and popular courses including,  “COVID-19 and the Law” and “Law as an Instrument of Behavior Change." Before teaching at UPenn, Dr. Anderson was a Senior Legal Fellow at Public Health Law Research (PHLR), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation based at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Prior to PHLR, Dr. Anderson was a faculty research associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a Senior Fellow at the Centers for Law and the Public's Health: A Collaborative at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities.