Tamarie Macon

As a public health major and English minor, Tamarie Macon worked with mentor and Project L/EARN co-director Jane Miller on a paper about children with special health care needs in New Jersey’s State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Her paper was accepted for publication in the journal Pediatrics and was co-authored with Miller, Project L/EARN mentors Dorothy Gaboda and Joel Cantor of the Center for State Health Policy and Project L/EARN course instructor Theresa Simpson.

She has presented the paper at national conferences of the Population Association of America, AcademyHealth, the American Public Health Association and a Kaiser Family Foundation conference on Medicaid and the uninsured. In her senior honors thesis, Macon extended her analysis to the adequacy of New Jersey FamilyCare health insurance coverage for children with special health care needs. After graduating from Rutgers in 2007, Macon participated in the Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholars summer internship program sponsored by Howard University and the Kaiser Foundation. For that program, she was matched with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine)—one of the co-sponsors of the SCHIP reauthorization bill.

After completing that program, Macon worked for three years as a legislative correspondent in Snowe’s office, where she was also a member of the health care reform team and worked on issues related to education and the environment. She is now a doctoral student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at the University of Michigan, where she plans to study mechanisms behind racial and gender disparities in educational attainment.