USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Biographical Sketch

Titus Galama, Ph.D., MBA, is a Senior Economist at the University of California (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. Titus is an award-winning astrophysicist who turned to business/management then policy analysis and economics. Titus Galama was awarded a M.Sc. in Physics in 1995 (cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics in 1999 (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, an MBA in 2003 from INSEAD, France/Singapore and a Ph.D. in Economics in 2011 from the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands. He has been at the forefront of several breakthrough discoveries in astrophysics, two of which were considered the 5th and 10th most significant scientific discoveries (in all science fields) of 1997 and 1999, respectively, by Science magazine. After completion of his thesis in astrophysics he worked as a Fairchild Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, U.S.A. He has authored over 60 scientific publications in top scientific journals (e.g., six papers in Nature). Following his career in astrophysics, he obtained an MBA from INSEAD at the Singapore and French campuses, and subsequently joined L.E.K Consulting, a global strategy-consulting firm, as a Senior Consultant in the Los Angeles office. Titus joined the RAND Corporation in 2006 and USC’s CESR in 2013. In these positions his focus has been on understanding the substantial disparities in health by socioeconomic status, utilizing economic principles. To this end he has developed structural theoretical models of health and retirement and of the formation of disparities in health by socioeconomic status. Titus is Principal Investigator on a National Institute of Aging (NIA) research grant aimed at improving our understanding of disparities in health between socioeconomic status groups (R01; $ 2,500,000; 2010) and an NIA Independent Scientist Award aimed at improving our understanding of disparities in health between education groups (K02; $870,000; 2012).