ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2025
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Nora V. Becker, MD, PhD has always been passionate about improving patient outcomes by studying the interactions between health, health policy, and financial well-being. As an MD-PhD student in health economics at the University of Pennsylvania, she demonstrated that the Affordable Care Act saved women $250/year in birth control costs, and these cost reductions caused women to increase their use of long-acting birth control by 15%.
During her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she saw the devastating impact of the pandemic on the financial stability of low-income and minority communities, but research in this area was limited by the fact that no current data source had both detailed health data and financial information for large populations.
As a the University of Michigan faculty member, Dr. Becker has pioneered the successful linkage of insurance claims data—from both commercial insurers and Michigan Medicaid—with consumer credit reports, overcoming statistical, computational, and regulatory barriers while protecting patients’ confidentiality. She used these data to demonstrate that enrollment in Medicaid expansion reduces medical debt sent to collections by $200-$400. In contrast, she found the risk of low credit scores and medical and non-medical debt in collections is doubled for commercially-insured individuals with chronic conditions.
As one of the few physicians nationally with advanced PhD training in health economics, Dr. Becker is well prepared to study the reciprocal interaction of health and financial outcomes for patients. Her work to date has produced high-impact publications, a K08 career development award, and recent national recognition and national service responsibilities with AcademyHealth, the nation’s largest health policy research society. Of all her accomplishments, Dr. Becker is most excited about the future potential applications of her novel work to link clinical and financial data sources, and she plans to use these linked data to build a new foundation of evidence for designing better health and social policies in the years to come.