Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Programs
Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy
Manoj Mohanan is vice provost for interdisciplinary programs and Creed C. Black Professor of Public Policy at Duke University. A member of the Duke faculty since 2009, he also holds appointments in economics and global health. He served as interim dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy from 2024 to 2026.
Mohanan’s path to Duke was itself interdisciplinary. After earning a medical degree from the University of Mumbai, he left clinical medicine to enroll at Harvard University, where he completed two master’s degrees at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and then a Ph.D. in health policy, concentrating in economics, through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
An applied microeconomist, Mohanan studies health and health care in developing countries, with a focus on provider quality and performance, performance-based contracts, and accountability. He has led field experiments and designed policy interventions, with much of his current work based in India. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-led the first seroprevalence studies in India, and he was named by Apolitical among the 100 most influential academics working on government. His research has been published in leading journals across disciplines, including Science, Science Advances, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Lancet, The Lancet Global Health and JAMA. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation and the World Bank. He is currently a standing member of the NIH study section on Population Dynamics and Health and has advised the Wellcome Trust (UK) and the World Bank on a broad range of topics.