Charley E. Willison (PhD, University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of public health at Cornell University. Dr. Willison joined Cornell after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Harvard Department of Health Care Policy and receiving her PhD in Health Policy and Political  Science at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

She is a political scientist studying the relationships between local politics, and public health political decision-making. Her research focuses on explaining public health policy outcomes for the most disadvantaged – persons in deep poverty, often with complex social and medical needs, who rely on public programs to address these needs – yet in many cases such policies are in short supply or absent. She is specifically interested in the ways in which the local political economy interacts with local political institutions to influence democratic decision-making processes, and ultimately policy outcomes, for high-risk, marginalized groups. Her two primary substantive areas of research are: homelessness and disaster response. Her research group is the Public Health Governance Lab.

Dr. Willison’s 2021 book, Ungoverned and Out of Sight: Public Health and the Political Crisis of Homelessness in the United States (Oxford University Press) examines why municipalities may use evidence-based approaches to address chronic homelessness in their jurisdictions or not. Ungoverned won the 2022 American Political Science Association’s Urban and Local Politics Dennis Judd Best Book Award for the best book on urban politics (domestic or international) published in the previous year. She is a Faculty Fellow in the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (2023-2024). She has given multiple testimonies and briefings to federal and subnational policymakers, including the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Email: cew253@cornell.edu