Richard Bruns is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Bruns’s research focuses on economic modeling and cost-benefit analysis of topics related to public health and the prevention and mitigation of global catastrophic biological risks, such as: long-term social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic; government policy responses and environmental engineering technologies to reduce the risks of future pandemics; pandemic-related catastrophe bonds and insurance markets; emerging technologies for securable indoor food production; and the monetized costs of health-related misinformation.

Dr. Bruns’s long-term research agenda includes using cost-benefit analysis to make the world’s preparations for pandemics and emerging biological risks as effective as possible and expanding the use of quality-adjusted life years to better measure a variety of life states and social conditions, so that cost-benefit analysis can include and properly account for all expected side effects of public policies