Chloe Bird Email Address

Senior Sociologist and Chair of the Diversity Forum

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND focuses on the issues that matter most such as health, education, national security, international affairs, law and business, the environment, and more. With a research staff consisting of some of the world's preeminent minds, RAND has been expanding the boundaries of human knowledge for more than 60 years.

I am a senior sociologist at the RAND Corporation, studying women’s health, gender differences in health and social determinants of physical and mental health, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. I am also editor-in-chief of the journal Women’s Health Issues. I am Principal Investigator of a Veterans Health Administration funded study assessing and mapping gender differences in quality of care for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes in VHA patients in California and Texas. My recent projects include a pilot study mapping gender differences in lipid screening among patients in one California health plan who had CVD or diabetes, and two National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute funded studies of the impact of neighborhoods and behaviors on allostatic load, morbidity and mortality based on data from the Women's Health Initiative and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study. In our book 'Gender and Health: The Effects of Constrained Choice and Social Policies', Patricia Rieker and I integrate social and biological models to improve understanding of how differences in men’s and women’s lives contribute to differences in their health. Our Constrained Choice Framework focus on how decisions beyond the level of individual, shape one's opportunities to pursue a healthy life. The impact of these decisions perpetuates gender, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health. Thus to improve population health and reduce disparities, policymakers need to focus on a broad range of issues that directly and indirectly effect stress exposure and health risks as well as health behaviors.Specialties: women's health, social determinants of health and illness, gender and health, racial and socioeconomic disparities, neighborhood effects, mental health, access and quality of care