About Us

Founding & Mission

Established in 1999 with major funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Center combines Rutgers University's traditional academic strengths in public health, health services research, and social science with applied research and policy analysis initiatives.

Housed within the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, a unit of Rutgers Health, the Center was conceived in response to the unique and essential role of the states in the formation and implementation of sound health policy.

The Center is home to an expert, dedicated team of multidisciplinary faculty and staff who regularly engage with key state health policy stakeholders to:

• Conduct rigorous, timely, and impartial research on health policy issues; 

• Provide objective and practical evaluation of programs and policy choices; 

• Educate current and future health policy makers, researchers, and administrators; and  

• Promote the practical application of scholarship in health policy.

How We Work

The Center engages in projects that are consistent with its mission of informing, supporting, and stimulating sound and creative state health policy in New Jersey and around the nation.

To achieve this mission, the Center limits its engagement to projects that meet the following criteria:

• The project will provide impartial information that has a high likelihood of being useful in health policy formation, implementation or evaluation or would otherwise advance important, generalizable knowledge about health and healthcare services.
• The Center has the capacity and resources (e.g., datasets) to conduct the project with a high level of scientific rigor and expertise.