New Associate Dean Combines Research and Working Toward Long-Term College Goals
Location: Academics
Department: Academics
Alan Mathios sees the results of his research every time he goes to the supermarket. The health claims and nutrition labels on everyday products like cereal and salad dressing represent years of studying consumer behavior, governmental policy, and marketing: first as a staff economist and econometrics consultant at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC); then, starting in 1992, as a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. Mathios was appointed the college’s associate dean for academic affairs in September 2004, but it’s clear that research is still an absorbing interest for him.
"My FTC experience has really flowed through my years here," Mathios says. "It’s shaped my research agenda continuously."
In some ways Mathios has never really stopped doing his old job. A recurrent finding in his research has been the positive impact on consumer choices that occurred when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began to permit manufacturers to make truthful and non-misleading health claims for food products.
"Based on these research findings, we were involved in trying to shape the future of health claims regulation in the United States," he says.
Following the period of relaxed regulation governing health claims, the FDA implemented the 1994 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which made it mandatory for food products to carry nutrition labels and which spelled out the information that must be provided. For salad dressings, that meant including fat content, which most high-fat dressings had omitted on earlier labels. In a follow-up study six years later, Mathios found sales of high-fat dressings dropped by 5 percent once these products were required to contain a nutrition label.
Research can yield unexpected results, though, as Mathios found when he, along with PAM professor Don Kenkel and graduate student Phil DeCicca, conducted a study for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to see whether higher cigarette taxes reduced the smoking rate among teenagers. "We went into the grant proposal expecting to find that the demand curve slopes downward," says Mathios.
But when the three researchers looked at the smoking onset rates in states that raised taxes, "we found very little evidence that taxes matter." In a current work in progress, they find that cultural attitudes toward smoking are a better predictor of whether a teen would choose to smoke. The overall conclusion: "If public health authorities believe they’re going to solve the youth smoking problem by raising taxes, we’re pessimistic that this alone will be an effective policy in reaching the goals outlined in Healthy People 2010," a nationwide initiative that aims, among other things, to cut the cigarette smoking rate in half by the end of the decade.
The research team presented the preliminary findings that taxes would not effectively deter teenagers from smoking onset at about the same time President Clinton was promoting a large $1.50 tax on cigarettes. Since one of the reasons for this proposed tax increase was to prevent teenaged smoking, there was an immediate, high-visibility uproar. "The results of our study were included in an article on the front page of the New York Times: Essentially Cornell researchers were concluding that President Clinton’s plan would not be all that effective in reducing smoking," Mathios says wryly. "Meanwhile, the tobacco companies were widely distributing our study; this was funded by NIH! We lost control of the process while the paper was still under revision and had not gone through the peer-review process."
The paper was ultimately published in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the top economic journals in the country. "That provided the legitimacy that says ‘This paper can’t just be dismissed’," says Mathios. But the experience underlined the potential hazards in analyzing and presenting preliminary data. "What it taught me was to be extremely careful about when to allow citation to preliminary work," he says.
The experience hasn’t diminished his enthusiasm for big projects. Mathios, along with PAM professors Rosemary Avery and Don Kenkel and research associate Dean Lillard, is currently studying the marketing of smoking cessation products, the advertising of prescription drugs, and how cigarette manufacturers rotate the various warning labels they are required to display in advertising. His work is aided greatly by the massive database of print ads for cigarettes and smoking cessation products that the research team has created.
Mathios also supervises $200,000 a year in funding from the Merck Foundation, which he allocates to individual research projects related to pharmaceutical policy. Projects include expanding the aforementioned database to include ads for pharmaceuticals; examining whether people are more likely to purchase smoking cessation products if the cost is covered by insurance; and determining the impact of state regulation of Medicaid on pharmaceutical outcomes.
His commitment to his students is exemplified by the fact that Mathios has won as many awards for teaching and advising as for research, including the 2004 Kendall S. Carpenter Advising Award, the Kappa Omicron Nu/Human Ecology Alumni Award for Excellence in Advising, and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence. As associate dean, Mathios is helping to position the college for success in the new century. “One set of issues I’m interested in relates to the educational benefits of the Capital Semester and Urban Semester programs; my goal is to maintain steady enrollment and see that they continue to be vibrant programs.” The Capital Semester is now being cross-listed with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to make it easier for students outside Human Ecology to participate.
“One advantage of the College of Human Ecology is that it has a small-college feel, but this exists within the resources of a major university,” Mathios says. Another college strength lies in its tradition of collaboration. “The organizing principle of our college is not around discipline, like most places; instead, we’re organized by issues that affect the human condition, and we bring faculty from different disciplines together to address these topics in a collaborative fashion,” he says. “That provides students with a breadth of approach that serves them well in the workforce and graduate school, because creative problem solving involves multiple disciplines and teamwork.” At the same time, “each member of our faculty tries to be an innovative disciplinarian: we have high-quality professors in the natural and social sciences. They work together to provide that multidisciplinary perspective, yet at the same time students are getting the best of the disciplines.
”In addition, “Darryl Scott, our director of admissions, brings us incredibly talented students, so the starting point is phenomenally strong,” says Mathios. “It’s a privilege to work with these students. They expect a lot from us, and that’s great, because they push us through those expectations.”
