Sylvia Kuo is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer for the Department of Economics. She is a health economist who joined the department in July 2012 as a Lecturer, having moved from a fully research-focused position at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research and the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice (formerly Community Health) in the Program in Public Health.
With her current teaching-focused orientation, her research agenda focuses on economics pedagogy, creating instructional tools and evaluating best practices, while continuously innovating her course and teaching practice. She is also a dedicated advisor which she views as a different facet of being an effective teacher, and has won numerous awards in this capacity.
Dr. Kuo primarily teaches an upper-level finance course ("Investments I") and the introductory economics course ("Principles"). Based on her involvement as a faculty advisor for the Brown Football and observations made from shadowing the team, she has developed a new course for Spring 2024 along with Dr. Sean Hendricks (Senior Associate Director of Athletics) called "Learning Transfer: Integrating Sport, School and Life." Its intent is to show student athletes that the skills and learning strategies that they have used to become competitive athletes can translate into the classroom; it also aims to empower students by helping with this “learning transfer” and providing time-efficient learning strategies, and how to effectively manage time to balance the demands of athletics, academics and personal lives. It also explicitly recognizes the heavy time commitment and the cognitive load from being a competitive athlete, especially during the season.
Dr. Kuo received her Ph.D. in Economics in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin - Madison where she was National Institute of Mental Health pre-doctoral trainee. Prior to coming to Brown in 2004, Dr. Kuo worked as a researcher for Mathematica Policy Research, studying physician access for vulnerable populations and changes in the health care system over time. Her research at the Center for Gerontology and Healthcare Research focused on vulnerable elderly nursing home residents, such as the (inappropriate) use of feeding tubes among elderly nursing home patients with advanced cognitive impairment.
