Ashlesha Datar

Ashlesha Datar is a Senior Economist and Associate Director of the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at USC. At CESR, she directs the Program for Children and Families. Her expertise is in leveraging natural experiments to understand how neighborhoods and place influence the health and well-being of children and families, with a special focus on obesity and its related health behaviors. She has previously led the Military Teenagers Environment, Exercise, and Nutrition Study (M-TEENS), a cohort study that followed adolescents in military families from ages 12-18 years to study neighborhood effects on obesity. She is currently leading multiple NIH-funded natural experiment studies in low-income communities in Los Angeles to examine how changes in built- and social-environments in neighborhoods influence diet, physical activity, and obesity among adolescents and adults. She has received over $19 million in funding from federal agencies and private foundations and has published in leading health, education, and policy journals. She received an MA in Economics in 1997 from the Delhi School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis in 2003 from the Pardee-RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, CA.