Dian Gu, PhD

Dian Gu, PhD, received her doctorate in Health Economics/Health Services Research from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Along with her PhD study, she was a PhD trainee in MD Anderson Cancer Center. In that role, she gained experience in applying health economics to cancer research, collaborating on manuscripts with clinicians on multiple projects concerned with cancer patients’ healthcare utilization, expenditures, and health outcomes.

After finishing her PhD, she joined the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco in 2019. In the work here, she mainly performs data analyses and collaborates on manuscripts with professors on a wide range of tobacco economics research projects. For example, she analyzed the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data (MEPS) and California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) to evaluate the economic impact of a $2-per-pack cigarette tax increase due to Proposition 56 on smoking behaviors, healthcare costs, and the financial burden on low-income people in California.

As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Gu is interested in integrating both cancer and tobacco research. Her current research areas of interest include 1) estimating economic costs attributable to tobacco use of cancer and other tobacco-related illnesses; 2) examining the role of tobacco use in cancer prevention and development; 3) evaluating the economic impact of different tobacco control policies on the financial burden on vulnerable populations.