Dr. Tara Watson is a professor of Economics and chair of the Public Health program at Williams College. As an applied microeconomist focused on U.S. social policy, Dr. Watson will focus her fellowship research on the U.S. social safety net and its implementation in New York State. Before graduate school, Dr. Watson worked at the Brookings Institution, studied health policy with a postdoctoral Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 2007 to 2009, and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She has also served as deputy assistant secretary for microeconomic analysis in the U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Economic Policy in 2015 to 2016.