Tomas J. Philipson is on leave as a professor in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and a faculty member in the Department of Economics and the Law School at the University of Chicago. He previously served in as the Senior Economic Advisor to the Commissioner of The Food and Drug Administration during 2003/04. Philipson was born and raised in Sweden where he obtained his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Uppsala University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and thereafter joined the University as a post-doctoral fellow in 1989, the faculty in 1990, and received tenure in 1998. He was a visiting faculty member at Yale University in the academic year 1994-95, and a visiting fellow at The World Bank in the winter of 2003. Philipson's research expertise is in health economics. He is a Co-Editor of the journal RAND Forums in Health Economics of Berkeley Electronic Press. His research has been published widely in many leading academic journals of economics.