Richard Bruns

Richard Bruns is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Dr. Bruns’s research focuses on economic modeling and cost-benefit analysis of topics related to public health and the prevention and mitigation of global catastrophic biological risks, such as: long-term social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic; government policy responses and environmental engineering technologies to reduce the risks of future pandemics; pandemic-related catastrophe bonds and insurance markets; emerging technologies for securable indoor food production; and the monetized costs of health-related misinformation.

Dr. Bruns’s long-term research agenda includes using cost-benefit analysis to make the world’s preparations for pandemics and emerging biological risks as effective as possible and expanding the use of quality-adjusted life years to better measure a variety of life states and social conditions, so that cost-benefit analysis can include and properly account for all expected side effects of public policies.

Before joining the Center, Dr. Bruns was a Senior Economist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), doing cost-benefit modeling of many FDA regulations and actions, including the Intentional Adulteration rule, which was designed to protect food production facilities against terrorist attacks; the PHO GRAS determination, also known as the “trans fat ban”; and a variety of other rules about food, tobacco and medical devices.