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You could say that Professor Susan Averett’s career has received a lot of interest lately.
Most recently, she became co-editor of Eastern Economic Journal along with Ed Gamber, professor and head of economics. Last month, her research on marriage and weight gain was featured in The New York Times under the headline “For Better, for Worse, for B.M.I.” In January, she was named eastern representative for the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.
Susan Averett, Dana Professor of Economics, works on a research project with Jeff Kari '10.
Established in 1973, Eastern Economic Journal had been edited by Hal Hochman, Simon Professor Emeritus of Economics and Business, 10 years ago. A quarterly academic publication, the journal publishes papers in all areas of economics and is devoted to free and open intellectual inquiry from all philosophical perspectives.
Averett, Dana Professor of Economics, joined the faculty in 1991 and served six years as department chair. She specializes in health economics and recently started a teaching a course on the topic. Her expertise in this area led to an appearance on the Today show in 2006 where she was interviewed by Matt Lauer on her research dealing with birth order and adolescent risk-taking. Her research has also been featured on BBC News, The Boston Globe,PBS, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
She is coauthor of the textbook Women and the Economy: Family, Work, and Pay (2004), is the author or coauthor of numerous articles in academic journals and has presented her work at national and international conferences. She offers the course Women in the Economy, which is based on her textbook.
Averett, who often includes students in her research, has been honored with nine awards for teaching excellence including Lafayette’s Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Award, the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Lecture Award, and the Marquis Teaching Award. She was the inaugural recipient of the James E. Lennertz Prize for Exceptional Teaching and Mentoring in 2004.
She is currently analyzing obesity data from South Africa with Nick Stacy ’11 (Mbabne, Swaziland), a double major in math and economics and business, and contributed a chapter on poverty and obesity to the Oxford Journal of Economic Inequality.
“Obesity in South Africa is similar to the U.S.,” she says. “People are getting heavier than they used to be, especially African women.”
The Eastern Economic Journal is the official publication of the Eastern Economic Association, a non-profit organization whose object is to promote educational and scholarly exchange on economic affairs. The association is currently headed by Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and headquartered at the Anisfield School of Business at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Previous presidents of the association have included five Nobel laureates and several former members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.