Tara Templin

Tara Templin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center. She serves as Co-Director of the Digital Health Economics & Policy Lab (DHEPLab).

Her research focuses on the population-level socioeconomic causes and consequences of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), and cost-effective public health policies for their prevention and treatment. Using a wide range of quantitative tools—from applied microeconometrics to machine learning for causal inference—she studies the causes of population health improvement in resource-constrained settings.

Dr. Templin has led studies on the economic drivers of nutrition-related chronic illness, how conditional cash transfers may influence obesity and hypertension rates, global health system financing and preparedness for NCDs, and effective treatments for cardiometabolic disease within resource-constrained health systems.

Prior to joining UNC, she was a National Institute on Aging T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berkeley Population Center, a Data Science Scholar at Stanford University, and a Research Fellow at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). She has also held positions at the Center for Global Development and the Council on Foreign Relations.