Ellicott C. Matthay, PhD

Dr. Matthay is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy of the Division of Epidemiology in the Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She completed her MPH in global health metrics and evaluation at the University of Washington, her PhD in epidemiology at UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral training at UC San Francisco and with the Evidence for Action program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Dr. Matthay's research focuses on the influence of social, economic, and physical characteristics of communities on health, and how policies can shift these characteristics to improve population health and reduce racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic health inequities. She has methodological expertise in epidemiologic and biostatistical methods, causal inference, policy evaluation, and geospatial data, and substantive expertise in violence, alcohol, and drugs. Dr. Matthay applies rigorous multidisciplinary causal inference methods to traditional and nontraditional public health data sources including population-based surveys, health care utilization records, and web-scraped documents. She also conducts methodological investigations to improve the way that research in her substantive areas is done. She believes that the methodological challenges that arise in social epidemiological research are particularly perplexing and that addressing them by improving the methodological rigor of applied studies is one of the most important steps to identifying effective prevention strategies.

Dr. Matthay’s research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. She currently holds a K99/R00 Career Development Award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to examine the interactive effects of local alcohol and cannabis policies on self-directed and interpersonal violence, and an R01 Award from National Center for Injury Prevention and Control to assess the impacts local alcohol control and economic support policies adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on firearm assault injuries.

Dr. Matthay has published over 70 peer-reviewed publications, including articles in The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, and Epidemiology. The exceptional rigor and creativity of her work was recognized by the Society for Epidemiologic Research with the prestigious Tyroler Student Paper Prize in 2017 and Lilienfeld Postdoctoral Prize in 2021. Dr. Matthay’s study tying stricter gun laws to increases in firearm violence after gun shows was named one of Annals of Internal Medicine’s Best Articles of 2017. Her evaluation of the Operation Peacemaker gun violence prevention program was named a “Public Health of Consequence” study in the American Journal of Public Health in 2019. Her 2021 study on the role of occupational inequities in driving racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19 mortality was cited in the Supreme Court briefing addressing vaccination and mask mandates. Dr. Matthay’s research has been covered by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and WIRED, among others.