Maria Fitzpatrick is a professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University whose work sits at the intersection of health and education policy, with a focus on how public programs shape children’s well-being and long-run human capital. At Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy, she studies school-embedded health services—such as school-based health and mental-health centers, vision care, and case-management—and evaluates how they affect outcomes like attendance, graduation, emergency-department use, and medication adherence. Her research frequently links large administrative datasets (Medicaid claims, hospital encounters, and school records) and applies modern causal methods—randomized or quasi-experimental designs—to generate actionable evidence for policymakers.

Beyond school health, Fitzpatrick analyzes policies that alter resources and incentives in early childhood, K–12 and higher education systems, including child welfare reporting, universal preschool, teacher compensation reforms, and college scholarships, and examines their downstream effects on learning, attainment, and family wellbeing. A throughline in her work is translational impact: partnering with public agencies and research-practice networks to design scalable evaluations and communicate results that help districts, states, and federal partners make better investments in children.

Professor Fitzpatrick is also the Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the Brooks School. Fitzpatrick is Codirector of the National Data Archive for Child Abuse and Neglect and is Associate Center Director of the Cornell Center for Health Policy Research.  She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as well as an Affiliate in the CESifoResearch Network and the Cornell Population Center.

Before arriving at Cornell, Professor Fitzpatrick was a Searle Freedom Trust postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. After receiving an undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, where she was both an Institute for Education Sciences and Spencer Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow.