Rusty Tchernis is a Professor of Economics in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). His primary areas of research are Applied Econometrics, Health Economics, and Labor Economics. Within these fields he is interested in program evaluation, spatial econometrics, and Bayesian methods, as well as the economics of childhood obesity. His work has been published in variety of journals including Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economics Statistics, and Journal of Human Resources. His research has been funded by various organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and the United States Department of Agriculture.

Prior to becoming a faculty member at the Andrew Young School, Rusty Tchernis was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Indiana University and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.