Ambar La Forgia, PhD Student in The Wharton School

My name is Ambar La Forgia. I'm a third year in the Healthcare Management and Economics Program at Wharton. I'd say my interests have changed a lot from when I applied and got accepted to now being in my third year. When I started, I was very much more interested in hospital charity care programs and I was very focused on those specifics and now, I'm much more interested generally in the effects of hospital and physician competition. So like if a physician practice is integrated into a hospital, how is that going to influence the cost and quality of healthcare? And that more generally falls under what is called industrial organization, which my department is really strong in.

I'd say my trajectory towards the PhD started when I was an undergrad at Swarthmore. I studied mathematics and economics there and I had great access to faculty who were very supportive and mentoring. And my favorite class was a health economics class. And I really liked how it brought together my interest in policy and my strength in statistics and econometrics, but at that point I hadn't had formal research experience. So I applied to the Summer Undergraduate Minority Research Program or SUMR here at Penn. What the SUMR Program does is take a diverse set of students from across the US, plops them together for a complete summer immersion in health services research.

So I got to be the research assistant to a few physician scholars. I got to meet with PhD students and faculty all across Wharton and I felt like I became part of the Wharton community at that point. And so when my time came to apply, I couldn't imagine a better fit for me personally and academically than Wharton.

I've had a unique background in that my mother's Dominican, my father is American Italian and I was born in Dominican Republic and then spent most of my life in Brazil. And I got to experience what it was like to live in a developing country and see the importance that health plays in development. And even thought that's much more of a macro way of thinking of healthcare, it solidified my desire to pursue some sort of policy or social impact related research.