Dr. Sledge’s research deals with public policy, health, and institutional development. He is currently engaged in a series of projects dealing with health policy, the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, disaster response and recovery, and the opioid epidemic.
His recent publications include “The Challenges of Modeling COVID-19,” forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), with Andrea Bertozzi, Elisa Franco, and George Mohler, and “From Disaster Response to Community Recovery,” published in the American Jour nal of Public Health, with Herschel F. Thomas.
His article “Linking Public Health and Individual Medicine: The Health Policy Approach of Surgeon General Thomas Parran” received the 2017 Paper of the Year Award from the American Public Health Association and the American Jour nal of Public Health. His research on the role of non-state service providers in supplementing state capacity after disasters has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Dr. Sledge’s book, Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State, offers a reinterpretation of the foundations and contours of modern American health policy, focusing on the divergence between policy regimes dealing with public health and with individual medical care. The book explores how public health policies have shaped health outcomes as well as the ways in which these changes have fed back into the health care system and reshaped policy priorities. It highlights the role of entrepreneurial bureaucrats in building new programs, generating support for them, and constructing new networks of intergovernmental relations.