His work focuses on the way in which social and economic factors impact health and mortality across the lifespan, with particular attention to the impact of work and earnings on cardiovascular biomarkers and obesity. He completed his dissertation at the Harvard School of Public Health in March of 2006 in the Department of Society, Human Development and Health. His dissertation, entitled “The non-linear impacts of income on mortality, biomarkers and growth,” documents the ways in which higher income has different returns to health and human development depending on a household's position in the income distribution.