Dr. Zhuo (Adam) Chen is Professor and DrPH Program Director, Department of Health Policy and Management, University of Georgia (UGA), USA; Visiting Chair Professor of Health Economics and Director (0.2FTE), Centre for Health Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Dr. Chen leads the Interdisciplinary Approaches to Social Determinants of Health Pre-Seed Team at UGA. He has published more than 140 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals, including the Lancet, Journal of Health Economics, and Social Science & Medicine.
Adam earned his Ph.D. in Economics and M.S. in Statistics from Iowa State University. Before Dr. Chen joined the University of Georgia, he was a senior health economist with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He was a recipient of the CDC Excellence in Social and Behavioral Science Research Award in 2013.
Adam served as the President (2017-2018) of the Chinese Economists Society (CES), a US non-profit organization serving economists with interests in China’s economy or with Chinese heritage. He led the efforts to establish the US-based China Health Policy and Management Society (CHPAMS) and served as the President of CHPAMS during 2016-2018. He also served as the President of the Asian Pacific Islander Employees of CDC/ATSDR during 2014-2016 and was awarded the Civilian Award of Excellence in Diversity by the Federal Asian Pacific American Council in 2016. He is a Board Director of the National Association of Chinese Americans (Atlanta) (https://www.naca-atlanta.org/) and the Federation of Asian Professor Associations (www.fapa-us.org), as well as a Board Observer on the 80-20 Education Foundation (https://www.80-20ef.org/).
Adam co-led the Health, Ethnicity, and Pandemic (HEAP) study, a collective effort to assess the health of Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular focus on the harm of anti-Asian hate crimes. Adam organized an event in 2023 for the Committee of 100 to discuss priorities to prevent the next pandemic, featuring former US CDC Directors, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan and Dr. Tom Frieden, and former China CDC Director, Dr. George Gao. Adam hosted a screening of “Blurring the Color Line” on March 22, 2023 in collaboration with UGA Association of Chinese American Professors and NACA. He directs the Social Determinants of Health Graduate Certificate at the College of Public Health, University of Georgia.
Adam is an Associate of the China Research Center and has served as a Board Member-at-large since 2022.
