Dr. Anita Chandra on Policy Research, Pandemics, and Finding Your Way to RAND

What a Vice President at RAND Actually Does
BW: First off, I wanted to thank you so much for allowing me to have this interview with you. I really appreciate it. The goal today is to give high school students, like myself, a better understanding of different career paths they might want to pursue—in this instance, a career in policy recommendation and research.
With that in mind, could you start by describing what your role is at the RAND Corporation and what a typical day looks like?
AC: Sure—happy to. I wear a couple of hats at RAND. I’m the vice president of one of our research divisions, called Social and Economic Well-Being, and I also still do research as a senior policy researcher.
So my days are really a mix of leadership and management responsibilities, along with direct research work. That’s a little unusual, but it speaks to the flexibility of an organization like RAND.
In my vice president role, I have a few big functions. One is overseeing the body of work we produce in key policy areas. That means I manage relationships with the funders who support our research—but even more importantly, I oversee the conduct and quality of that research and make sure we’re having the impact we intend.
RAND’s mission is about the public good. We’re nonpartisan and independent. It’s really important that we get our work out there, that we meet decision-makers where they are, and that we inform policy decisions in real time when possible—or push people to think differently about policy issues.
On any given day, that means both internal and external work. Internally, I’m supporting research staff, mentoring people, making sure projects are executed well and on time. Externally, I’m talking about RAND’s work to policymakers, funders, and other stakeholders—sometimes the media, sometimes other influencers.
And no day looks the same. I might be talking about climate change in the morning, criminal justice reform in the afternoon, and science and tech policy in the evening, because the division I direct covers a lot of ground. That’s exciting for someone like me who doesn’t want to stay in a single topic area and likes to connect the dots. A place like RAND has been a really good fit.

How Big Public Policy Projects Turn Into Publications
BW: I was scrolling through your profile on RAND’s website and was genuinely in awe of the sheer number of publications you’ve worked on. Could you break down the process of creating those publications? How long do they take? How do you get the research? How do you choose a topic?
AC: One thing about RAND is that we look for people who are pretty entrepreneurial.
What does that mean? A few things. One is that they can connect dots—they’re not so narrowly specialized that they’re only doing one tiny thing forever. Unlike a university department, where you might become an expert on one very specific topic, at RAND we want people to have expertise in key areas and be able to connect those areas.
When you come into the organization and start building project work, you’re thinking that way. You’re writing proposals, getting your work funded and supported—that’s the first step, before you even get to publishing. Someone has to be interested in supporting the research, whether it’s the U.S. government, philanthropic foundations, or foreign governments. As long as we maintain our independence and quality standards, we work with a lot of partners around the world.
Those projects eventually result in publications—but not all dissemination is in the form of traditional written reports. We do RAND Reports, which go through a rigorous peer-review process. Sometimes we publish externally in academic journals.
But we also do a lot of other things: we testify in front of Congress, we create more digital content than ever before, we write shorter briefs and blog-style pieces. People need information faster now. Different generations consume information differently. Not everyone is going to pick up a 100- or 200-page RAND report and read it cover to cover.
So we’re experimenting with different ways to “publish”—really, to disseminate—and get insights into the right hands at the right time. That’s the trick of public policy work: knowing the ecosystem, understanding windows of opportunity, and making sure you have something useful ready when decision-makers are ready to hear it.
Publications are one piece of that, but not the only one.

Survey Research, COVID-19, and Understanding Public Attitudes
BW: You recently published an article titled Preparing for the Next Pandemic, where you ask whether COVID-19 has changed American attitudes. I was really interested in how that data was collected. I saw some of the methods, but I wanted to ask more specifically: how do you send surveys out, and how do you choose who you send them to?
AC: Great question. I do a decent amount of survey research, along with others at RAND. I’m what people might call a mixed-methods researcher.
Some people at RAND spend a lot of time with what we call secondary data—things like hospital claims, military personnel data, and so on. That’s important. Others, like me, also do a lot of primary data collection. One key way we do that is through surveys.
We have our own survey infrastructure at RAND. For example, we run something called the American Life Panel, where we follow a set of Americans over many years. I’ve also worked with external survey firms to build samples.
Sampling is absolutely critical. It allows us to say that the work is nationally representative. We think carefully about how to get the right demographic mix, how to use statistical weighting so the sample matches the U.S. population, and how to avoid skewed results.
There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work in recruitment and sampling frames, on top of the careful work of designing the survey questions themselves.
Since 2015, we’ve been asking Americans how they view their health in general—where their ideas, myths, and perceptions come from—because, in many ways, the U.S. is still facing a health crisis. During COVID, we went much deeper with a sample of Americans, tracking how their perspectives changed over time.
The idea was: if we understand how people are thinking during a crisis, we can improve risk communication in the future. I don’t think anyone would say our COVID response was perfect. Some things went well; some didn’t. One area where we struggled was communicating risk: explaining how information was changing daily, what the latest protection standards were, and so forth.
By capturing attitudes during the pandemic, with a robust sample, we gained insights we can carry into the next emergency—because there will be a next emergency, whether it’s a pandemic, a climate-related disaster, or something else.
And stepping back, one thing that distinguishes RAND is that we do a lot of our own data collection and analysis. Many policy organizations mainly interpret or comment on existing data. We do that and build original datasets—which helps us pose interesting questions and design strong methods.

When Research Shapes National Policy
BW: Your work at RAND addresses a wide range of social issues, and you mentioned earlier that funding can sometimes come from the U.S. government. Could you share a few examples of how your research or policy recommendations have had an impact—maybe even at a national level?
AC: Sure. During the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, we did some of the first and only work on how those wars affected children in military families.
Those conflicts involved the military differently than previous wars. The National Guard and Reserves were called up more, which meant many families weren’t living on bases or used to a “traditional” military lifestyle. Their kids might have seen a parent leave for one weekend a month, not long deployments.
We didn’t know much about how adolescents were handling that—caring for younger siblings, dealing with stress, managing school. Our work essentially informed some of the initiatives led by then–First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to support military families. We met with them several times, and those efforts continue in different forms today.
Another example: my work on pandemic and disaster response helped inform the United States’ first-ever National Health Security Strategy. For a long time, “health security” wasn’t really a defined policy area. But with climate change, geopolitical instability, bioterrorism, and advances in things like synthetic biology, health security has become a critical concept.
Years ago, our work on emergency preparedness, public health, anthrax, and pandemics put us in the room, behind the scenes, helping to design that first national strategy. It’s had a long-lasting impact.
Some of my work on community resilience and trauma has been used internationally, including in regions like Israel and Palestine, where communities are dealing with overlapping trauma and prolonged conflict. It’s sobering, but it shows how research on resilience can be applied in many contexts.
These are just snapshots. The bigger point is that at RAND, we measure success by impact on the public good, not just by the number of publications. Publishing is a means to an end: informing better decisions.

Dr. Anita Chandra is a vice president and senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, one of the world’s leading public policy research institutions. Her work spans everything from climate resilience and disaster response to children’s health, community trauma, and national health security. In this conversation for The Pathway Blog, she explains what her job actually looks like, how big public policy projects move from idea to impact, what high school experiences nudged her toward research and systems-level work, and what students can do now if they’re curious about careers in policy and evidence-based public service.
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This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.