Heather Royer is an associate professor of economics at University of California-Santa Barbara. Her main research interests include the social determinants of health and the use of behaviorally-motivated interventions to improve health behaviors. She has studied how education affects health using policy variation induced by school entry policies and compulsory schooling policies in the United States and England. More recently, she has conducted randomized-controlled trials to understand the effects of incentives for exercising and healthy eating. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has a keen interest in endurance sports – long distance open water swimming, marathon running and triathlons, and pursues with them with some irregularity.