Patrick Wightman is a Research Scientist with the Center for Population Science and Discovery. He earned his PhD in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 2009. His dissertation examined the effect of parental job loss on children. From 2009 to 2013 he was the MacArthur Foundation Network on Transitions to Adulthood post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, where his research focused on the economic support provided to young adults by their parents and the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status. Prior to joining the UofA in the fall of 2014, he was a Sr. Economic Analyst with the Oregon Health Authority in Portland, OR, where he evaluated the impact of the Affordable Care Act on health insurance and care utilization. Dr. Wightman has extensive experience with a variety of statistical methodologies in the context of both large and small scale datasets.