Sarah A. Nowak, Ph.D., is a physical scientist at the RAND Corporation, specializing in mathematical modeling. Much of Dr. Nowak’s recent work has focused on using the RAND COMPARE microsimulation model to evaluate health insurance reforms including assessing the impact of the Affordable Care Act on individual and family spending, and how alternatives to current Affordable Care Act provisions would impact health insurance coverage and enrollment, government spending, and families’ health care spending. Dr. Nowak also led a recent study that used a survey of patients and agent-based modeling to examine the role of social networks on women’s breast cancer screening decisions. Dr. Nowak holds a Ph.D. in biomathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.