Troy Tassier, Ph.D., is Professor of Economics at Fordham University in New York City with additional affiliations in the Urban Studies Program and the International Political Economy and Development Program. He is a world expert in the fields of economic epidemiology and social network analysis who is frequently sought out by major media outlets for his commentary on the Covid-19 pandemic including the Associated Press, Reuters, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, ABCnews.com, Crain’s New York Business, and many others.
Professor Tassier is widely published in notable academic journals and has also written for Scientific American and the Skynomics blog. He regularly speaks at international conferences across North America and Europe on topics combining social network analysis, epidemiology, and economics. His first book, The Economics of Epidemiology (published by Springer Briefs in Public Health), introduces concepts in epidemiology to graduate level economics and social science students and connects public health issues to economics.
Prior to his career as a teacher and researcher, Professor Tassier worked in the banking industry in various positions. His responsibilities in this phase of his professional career included consumer mortgage lending, commercial loan underwriting, and, in his last position, managing interest rate risk on a $100 million mortgage portfolio.
His latest work, The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in Fall 2023.
https://sites.google.com/site/troytassier
Praise for The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus
“The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus sheds new light on age-old inequalities in health. Troy Tassier offers us both an indictment of the societal conditions that fueled sharply uneven losses during the COVID-19 pandemic and an invitation to reimagine a new normal in its aftermath”
— Anne Sosin, Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences, Dartmouth College
“Troy Tassier’s book offers up an inconvenient truth: the burden of COVID pandemic, like all others before it, fell most heavily on the poor and marginalized. This disproportionate impact is not an accident—it is the result of deliberate choices that are promoted by those who are well-off in our societies; it is death by public policy”
— Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health
“From cholera to COVID, pandemics have disproportionately affected the poor. In a book that is spectacular in its breadth, clarity, and humaneness, Tassier brilliantly interweaves a history of pandemics with a scientific account of how disease spreads to demonstrate the structural causes of epidemic disparities”
— Scott E. Page, University of Michigan
