Siddharth Chandra
Professor and Director
An expert on: Asia; demography; drug policy, trafficking, and use; economics; epidemiology; India; Indonesia; influenza; health; history.
Get in touchBiography
I direct the Asian Studies Center and am Professor of Economics in James Madison College at Michigan State University. I received my Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, A.M. (Ph.D. pass) in economics from the University of Chicago, and B.A. (with honors) in economics from Brandeis University. Prior to joining Michigan State University, I was Director of the Asian Studies Center and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.
My
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research interests include behavior and policy relating to addictive substances, the intersection of demography, economics, health, and history in Asia, and applications of portfolio theory to fields outside finance, for which the theory was originally developed.
I have received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for my research, which has appeared or will appear in a variety of journals including American Psychologist, Emerging Infectious Diseases, American Journal of Epidemiology, Demography, Population Studies, Demographic Research, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Tobacco Control, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, the International Journal of Drug Policy, the Journal of Research in Personality, the Journal of Regional Science, Land Economics, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, World Politics, The British Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Asian Studies.
Geographic focus areas of my research include Indonesia and South Asia.
Education
Cornell University: Ph.D., Economics
Brandeis University: B.A., Economics
University of Chicago: A.M., Economics
Selected Press
1918 Pandemic provides warning about COVID-19's future
Futurity | 2021-02-15
After a decade studying a flu virus that killed approximately 15,000 Michigan residents, Siddarth Chandra, a professor in the James Madison College at Michigan State University, saw his research come to life as he watched the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was so surreal,” says Chandra, who has a courtesy appointment in epidemiology and biostatistics. “All of a sudden, I was living my research.”
How the Spanish flu of 1918 changed India
The Caravan | 2018-10-19
ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, when Indian-born health economist Siddharth Chandra took up the directorship of the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, he had barely given any thought to the 1918 flu pandemic. He was searching for data that would speak to an entirely different question—how governments have historically manipulated access to opium and other addictive drugs to control populations and raise revenue—and his focus was the Dutch East Indies, or Indonesia, in the early-twentieth century. Realising that Indian population data for the same period was more detailed, he shifted his focus. Soon he noticed something odd: between the censuses carried out by the colonial authorities in 1911 and 1921, the Indian population had not grown as fast as it might have been expected to. He suspected that the reason was flu.
The Virus That Killed 18 Million Indians
OPEN | 2018-09-07
The paper’s author, Siddharth Chandra, director of Asian Studies Centre at the Michigan State University, had been working on an unrelated project on colonial India, for which he needed annual population statistics. He used data from the census of India, which was taken once every 10 years. When he looked at the figures for the Censuses of 1911 and 1921, he noticed that the population had grown far more slowly than it should have given the trajectory from prior decades.
MSU To Host World’s Largest Research Hub on China-Africa Engagement
MSU Today | 2018-01-18
Michigan State University will host the world’s largest independent, interdisciplinary research network dedicated to China-Africa engagement.
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