Briefly
Sandra (Sandy) Hoffmann is a senior economist with the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) in the Diet, Safety and Health Economics Branch of the Food Economics Division. Her research focuses on food safety, the valuation of the health benefits of public policies, and the integration of economic analysis and risk assessment. She is recognized for her research on the cost of foodborne illness, attribution of foodborne illness to its food sources, and children's environmental health. Sandy served on the National Academy of Sciences committee on the Effectiveness of National Biosurveillance Systems. She currently serves on the World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Foodborne Disease Reference Group, on advisory panels to the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency and to Food Standards Australia New Zealand on health valuation. She has also advised the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency on valuation of children's benefits from environmental health programs. She is an academic editor for the PLOS ONE journal and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics and Foodborne Pathogens and Disease.
Current Projects:
- Cost of Foodborne Illness in the United States—Updating the USDA, ERS Cost-of-Foodborne Illness Database
- Age and the Cost of Foodborne Illnesses in the United States
- Enhancing the Foundations for Estimating the Economic Impact of Chronic Outcomes of Foodborne Disease in the United States
- Estimating U.S. Consumers’ Willingness to Pay to Reduce Risk of Non-Fatal Foodborne Disease Outcomes
- Global Foodborne Disease—World Health Organization’s Global Burden of Disease Estimation
Background
Prior to joining ERS in 2010, Sandy was a Research Fellow at Resources for the Future (2000–2010) and a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1999–2000). She also practiced pesticide and chemical manufacture regulatory law (1986–1989) and served with the U.S. Peace Corps in rural Chile (1980–1982).
Education
Sandy holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also received a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and her B.S. from Iowa State University.
Professional Affiliations
Sandy is a member of the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP), the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), the Society for Benefit Cost Analysis (SBCA), and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE).
Selected Publications
Hoffmann, S., Ashton, L., & Ahn, J.-W. (2021). Food safety: A policy history and introduction to avenues for economic research. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 43, 680–700.
Hoffmann, S., & Scallan, E. (2020). Evaluating the science available to inform updated cost of foodborne illness estimates. Foodborne Pathogens and Disease, 17(3).
Li, M., Havelaar, A. H., Hoffmann, S., Hald, T., Kirk, M. D., Torgerson, P. R., & Devleesschauwer, B. (2019). Global disease burden of pathogens in animal source foods. (2010). PLOS ONE, 14(6), e0216545.
Hoffmann, S., Krupnick, A., & Ping, Q. (2017). Building a set of internationally comparable VSL studies: Estimates of Chinese willingness to pay to reduce mortality risk. Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis, 8(2), 251–289.
