Overview
Steven H. Woolf is a physician and public health researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where he directs the Center on Society and Health. He is a leading scholar on U.S. health disadvantages relative to other high-income countries, social determinants of health, and geographic disparities in mortality. His 2019 JAMA paper with Schoomaker provides the most comprehensive joinpoint characterization of the 60-year arc of U.S. life expectancy and the multi-decade slowdown and post-2014 reversal.
Key Contributions
- Co-authored (with Schoomaker) the definitive 60-year joinpoint analysis of U.S. LE trends showing plateau at 2011 and three-year decline 2015–2017 (Woolf and Schoomaker 2019)
- Extended the deaths-of-despair framework to all racial and ethnic groups, documenting that by 2014 WNH, Hispanic, BNH, and AI/AN populations were all in retrogression
- Quantified the geographic concentration of excess midlife deaths in the Ohio Valley (OH, PA, IN, KY = 32.8% of all excess deaths 2010–2017 despite 10.8% of population)
- Documented state LE divergence to 7.0 years and the state policy divergence hypothesis linking 1990s LE gaps to neoliberal devolution of federal social policy authority to states
- Earlier work: co-edited the National Research Council / Institute of Medicine report U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health (2013)
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