Professor Carpenter is a health and labor economist who studies the effects of public policies on health and family outcomes. At Vanderbilt he was the Founding Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Research on Inequality and Health and the Vanderbilt LGBTQ+ Policy Lab. Carpenter is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and Co-Director of the NBER Economics of Health Program. He has published widely on the effects of legal same-sex marriage, the causes and consequences of youth substance use, and the effects of public policies on health behaviors such as bicycle helmet use, seatbelt use, smoking, cancer screening, and vaccination. Carpenter’s research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Cancer Society