Ep. 60: Dr. Jamila Michener is a professor of government and public policy at Cornell University. She studies poverty, racism and public policy, with a particular focus on health and housing. She is author of Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Uncivil Democracy: How Access to Justice Shapes Political Power (Princeton University Press, 2026). She is co-editor of Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Sage Publications, 2024). She is inaugural director of the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures and senior associate dean for public engagement at the Brooks School of Public Policy.

Jamila’s research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute for Research on Poverty, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the Ford Foundation. Her public writing has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Vox, and other many other outlets. She works closely with community-based organizations around the country to apply research insights to address urgent problems facing racially and economically marginalized communities.

Prior to working at Cornell, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at the University of Michigan. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University.

Listen now, and learn more about how Jamila is a pioneering leader in healthcare.

For more about the Health Fund, visit https://healthfund.org/