Meet the Team

Andrew Fenelon is an Assistant Professor of public policy and sociology at Penn State and a faculty associate of the Population Research Institute. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Health Services Administration in the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park and acting associate director of the Maryland Population Research Center. He holds a doctorate in sociology and demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of arts in geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Selena E. Ortiz, Ph.D., MPH, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Ortiz’s research focuses on addressing health disparities and improving health equity within the context of chronic disease and the social determinants of health. Her work does this in two ways: first, by examining health and social policy formation and, second, by examining access to health services and outcomes. Dr. Ortiz incorporates diverse methodologies, including semi-structured interviews, qualitative and quantitative content analysis, topic modeling, population-based online survey experiments, and diverse econometric methods. The unique stamp of her work, which has been published in Public Health Reports, Preventive Medicine, the American Journal of Public Health, Medical Care, Social Science and Medicine, and JAMA, is its theoretical focus on identifying processes of health inequity from policy formulation to implementation.

Vipul Kapoor is a second-year graduate student at Penn State’s School of Public Policy, specializing in Information Technology policy. He graduated from Penn State in 2020 with a degree in Political Science. Outside of this, Vipul works full-time at a civic technology startup, Column Software, PBC.

Barbara McGrath is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Health and Human Development. She is interested in studying global health, health insurance decision making, mixed methods research, social determinants of health, and health care access.