Joanne Yoong is an applied economist working at the intersection of behavioural economics, health and financial decision making, and socioeconomic development. Dr. Yoong’s primary appointment is as Senior Economist at the University of Southern California, where she directs the offices of the Center for Economic and Social Research in Singapore and Washington DC, and is a principal member of the USC Behavioral Economics Studio. Dr Yoong is also a visiting associate professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University Hospital, an honorary senior lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an adjunct economist at the RAND Corporation. She has previously held positions as Associate Professor of Health Systems and Behavioral Sciences at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health and the Director of the Center for Health Services and Policy Research at the National University Hospital System.  Dr Yoong serves on various national and international policy advisory committees, and has also served as Director of the Asia Pacific Regional Capacity-Building for Health Technology Assessment (ARCH) Initiative, an APEC-funded multi-country collaboration to promote health technology assessment among member economies, Director of the RAND Behavioural Finance Forum 2012, and is a founding member of the steering committee for the  Asian Workshop for Health Economics and Econometrics.  Dr. Yoong’s academic research has been published in leading economics, medical and public health journals has been funded by the WHO, OECD, NIH, DFID, World Bank and USAID.  In addition to her research work, Dr Yoong is the founder of Research for Impact, a Singapore-based social enterprise dedicated to making rigorous and objective research and evaluation accessible, inclusive and transformative for populations in Asia. Dr Yoong received her Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University as an FSI Starr Foundation Fellow and her AB summa cum laude in Economics and Applied and Computational Mathematics from Princeton University

Ph.D. Economics, Stanford, 2008
A.B. Economics, minor in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton, 2000