Rate My Professor Julie Zissimopoulos

Julie Zissimopoulos is a Professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where she serves as Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000, an M.A. in International and Public Affairs from Columbia University in 1993, and a B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science and Spanish from Boston College in 1991. Her professional career began at the RAND Corporation, where she served as Associate Economist from 2000 to 2004, Economist from 2004 to 2011, Senior Economist from 2010 to 2011, and Professor of Economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School from 2007 to 2011. At USC, she held positions as Associate Professor of Research in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Health Economics from 2011 to 2014, Assistant Professor in Public Policy from 2014 to 2017, Associate Professor from 2017 to 2022, and full Professor since 2022. She also has courtesy faculty status in the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology since 2019.

Dr. Zissimopoulos is Co-Director of the Aging and Cognition Program at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and Principal Investigator and Director of two National Institute on Aging-funded centers: the USC Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias Resource Center for Minority Aging Research and the Center for Advancing Sociodemographic and Economic Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias. Her research examines the economic costs of dementia, impacts of dementia on care partners, use and response to drug therapies for conditions influencing dementia risk, racial and ethnic disparities in dementia diagnosis and health care, and population measures of dementia using Medicare claims and survey data. Notable publications include "Role of PCPs in Diagnosing Dementia in Traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage" (Haye, Jacobson, and Zissimopoulos, 2025, Alzheimer’s & Dementia); "Dementia Severity at Incident Diagnosis in a Population Representative Sample of Older Americans" (Xu et al., 2024, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions); and "After Risk-Adjustment Change, Dementia Diagnoses Increased In Medicare Advantage Relative To Traditional Medicare" (Haye et al., 2025, Health Affairs). She has received the USC Price School High Impact Research Award in 2024, multiple USC Price Gold Research Awards, and serves as Lead Editor for the Health Policy and Caregiving Section of Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Dr. Zissimopoulos has co-chaired the National Research Summit on Care, Services, and Supports for Persons Living with Dementia and participated in National Academies committees on dementia research priorities.