Ph.D. Candidate, RAND School of Public Policy, and Assistant Policy Researcher, RAND
Ben Senator is a Ph.D. candidate at the RAND School of Public Policy and an assistant policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, and formerly a research assistant at RAND Europe. His research interests lie in the public health, social, and criminal justice impacts of regulatory approaches to legal and illicit substances. Senator has supported multiple projects with the RAND Drug Policy Research Center, with his current work concerning de jure non-medical cannabis policy developments, the effectiveness of policy responses to the U.S. opioid epidemic, alternative policy options to psychedelic drug prohibition, and the Dutch cannabis supply chain pilot. He also maintains a focus on broader social policy research, with current work researching veterans’ housing and crisis support.
Senator is proficient in both qualitative and quantitative analysis, with interests in applications of causal inference in drug policy research. He has supported a number of quantitative analyses, including estimating the impacts of supply-side policy changes to the Dutch nonmedical cannabis market, the effectiveness of education-based randomized controlled trials, gender differences in financial decisionmaking, prevalence estimates of psychedelic drug use, and societal costs of hate crime. He has additionally supported systematic literature reviews and qualitative research projects that utilize stakeholder interviews and ethnographic methods.
Prior to joining RAND, Senator worked as a research assistant with University College London whilst studying for his M.Sc. in social policy and social research. He holds a B.A. in geography from the University of Birmingham.
