Dr. Sylvia Brandt was appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Advisory Council for Clean Air Compliance Analysis (COUNCIL). Established in 1991, the Council provides guidance on methodologies used to evaluate the Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments of 1990.
Brandt is an Associate Professor of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she holds a joint appointment with the Center for Public Policy and Administration. Her primary research interests include valuation of chronic illnesses, measurement of disparities in health outcomes and methodologies for evaluating health interventions. Her work expands on traditional economic models to include factors such as exposure to environmental triggers, disparities in asthma treatment, and diversity of preferences among affected populations. She specializes in developing surveys on risk perceptions and health behaviors to improve models of household behaviors. She has also previously done extensive research on fisheries regulation, focusing on the design, implementation, and effect of tradable property rights.
Her current projects include estimating the costs of asthma linked to traffic-related pollution (funded by the South Coast Air Quality Management District) and modeling responses to climate change. In 2005-2006, Brandt was a Visiting Scholar in the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. She has served as a reviewer for a dozen public health and environmental economics journals.