Professor Kolstad is a Professor at the Haas School of Business, where he holds the Henry J. Kaiser Chair, and in the Economics Department at UC Berkeley. He is also a Core Faculty Member in the Computational Precision Health Graduate Group at UC Berkeley and UCSF and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His research interests lie at the intersection of health economics, industrial organization and public economics. He is interested in finding new models and unique data that can account for the complexity of policy relevant markets, health care in particular. Much of his work applies tools from behavioral economics and machine learning to better understand behavior and market outcomes and to design policy and technology interventions to improve welfare.

Kolstad was awarded the ASHEcon Medal in 2018, given biennially to the economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics, the Arrow Award for the best paper in health economics in 2014 and the NIHCM Foundation Research Award in 2016 and 2018. Professor Kolstad is also a co-founder of Picwell and Healthpilot and a founding advisor to OODA Health. Professor Kolstad received his PhD from Harvard University and BA from Stanford University.