Shu Wen Ng is a health economist who seeks to understand individual and household-level decisions about dietary behaviors and their health impacts, while acknowledging that such decisions are constrained by monetary, time and biological factors, and are made within a broader environmental or policy context. She uses tools and approaches from economics, epidemiology, sociology and public policy, and collaborates with these disciplinary experts.

Shu Wen has been Principal and co-Investigator on several foundation and NIH studies that use ‘big-data’ on commercial store sales, household purchase, and nutrition label data at the barcode level (scanner data), alongside dietary intake and nutrition databases and policy databases. Analyzing such data, she has studied how policies such as taxation, subsidies or quotas affect consumer purchases, diet, nutrition, and health outcomes across many settings, as well as differentially across subpopulations.