Claire L. Ma
PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
I am a policy researcher working at the intersection of politics, regulation, and public health. Currently, I am completing my PhD in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where I study U.S. health policy, business-government relations, and data regulation. Starting in Fall 2024, I will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Center for the Assessment of Tobacco Regulations at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
My research focuses on the politics of health policy from a comparative perspective, using primarily qualitative and historical methods. My book-length dissertation, titled The Politics of Regulating Data Privacy in the American Political Economy, examines the development of U.S. federal health data protections since the 1970s. In my dissertation, I examine the pathways by which the U.S. federal government comes to regulate data-driven discrimination in health insurance.
From 2022 to 2024, I co-founded and organized with Trevor Brown (Cornell) and Rachel Fordham (UC Berkeley) the Consortium on the American Political Economy Junior Working Group (CAPE-JWG), an online workshop series that is affiliated with the Consortium on American Political Economy (CAPE) and the American Political Economy (APE) section at APSA.