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Anup Malani Makes Apolitical's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government

Apolitical's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government


Apolitical

Great policy research from academic institutions isn’t always able to cut-through and make an impact. But when research does resonate with policymakers, it has the potential to steer the direction of government. Academic research remains a vital source of information and innovation. This is why Apolitical invited public servants to nominate the academics who are the most influential to the work of government.

We’re excited to share Apolitical’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government list below. The list highlights work that’s influenced the policymaking process by providing insights into policy problems, contributing innovative ideas and solutions, or adding relevant and informative data. Each nominee on the list is committed to improving the work of government, and their research has already made an impact. Read on to learn about each person, in their own words.

This year, we recognise academics working in five timely policy areas that are the focus of government work around the world. The areas represent problems being faced by government everywhere, and present an opportunity for intergovernmental collaboration. They are:

  1. Recovery from Covid-19
  2. Employment and skills
  3. Social policy
  4. Climate and sustainability
  5. Policymaking processes and approaches

We also asked public servants to nominate academics working in other areas important to them, and to highlight academic authors who have made an impact on their lives, either by offering a source of inspiration, or helping them choose a career path in government.

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Anup Malani

United States

Lee and Brena Freeman Professor

Anup Malani is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, a Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston.

  • He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He conducts research in development economics, health economics and law and economics. During the COVID pandemic, Malani led a modeling team that developed a forecasting model and method of adaptive control for COVID in India; that model was used to inform policy in Bihar and in Indonesia. Malani was an investigator on population-level viral surveys in Bihar, serological (antibody) surveys in Mumbai, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, and a cellular immunity survey in Bangalore. This work on COVID has won two Emergent Ventures prizes. He worked on vaccine distribution policies for Indonesia and India. He also used a large, panel survey to estimate the number of excess deaths in India during the pandemic and to understand the economic impacts of the pandemic. He is now conducting verbal autopsies on roughly 30,000 to determine the fraction of excess deaths that are attributable to COVID. Finally, Malani has studied how Indian households adapted financially to COVID and the impact of COVID on individual income inequality in India. Prior to the pandemic, Malani’s research focused on development economics. Malani was the principal investigator for the Indian Health Insurance Experiment, an 11,000 household evaluation of India’s first national health insurance program. He conducted ethnographic research in 21 slums across 7 cities for a book and film on the economics of slums in India.
  • In the field of health economics, Malani developed new models to value medical innovation and improve clinical research. His recent work in law has focused on improving methods for doctrinal analysis of case law. Malani’s research has been published in journals in several different fields, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Harvard Law Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Theoretical Population Biology.
  • Malani is the co-founder and Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps, a social service program that sends postgraduates to work on innovative projects with government officials in India and the US. Malani has a J.D. and Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago. He was a law clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and the founding Faculty Director of the Tata Centre for Development at the University of Chicago.

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