Eric Pachman

Eric Pachman grew up in Manhattan in the early 80s, raised by two loving parents and, as he tells it, two very friendly midtown east doormen. What followed was a career that looked random from the outside but was quietly building toward something: Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida, Harvard Business School, Morgan Stanley, a family fund, CSX railroad modeling, and then (the next logical step) running a small chain of community pharmacies in Dayton, Ohio.

It was there that Eric first encountered the stunning dysfunction of American drug pricing. That discovery consumed him. He left to write, analyze, and data-visualize full time, founding 46brooklyn Research and 3 Axis Advisors. His analyses led to an Ohio Auditor investigation uncovering $225 million in hidden PBM spread pricing, policy changes in more than a dozen states, and the restructuring of New York's $2 billion Medicaid drug benefit. His work also accelerated the movement toward cost-plus drug pricing in the commercial marketplace.

Drug pricing, Eric came to understand, was a symptom of a greater problem in America. The disease is inequality, and at the root of inequality is something even more fundamental: who controls our data.

Eric believes we live in strange times. The same technology that gives us unprecedented access to knowledge is simultaneously keeping that knowledge from us, tailoring our experience of truth to flatter rather than inform. Data has followed the same path as income: enriching the few while being used to divide the rest. He founded Data 4 The People in late 2024 to push back against that tide. D4TP is a public-interest research and storytelling organization built to democratize data-driven analysis, cracking open the slow and expensive commissioned-research industry and putting those tools in the hands of nonprofits, community advocates, local journalists, and ordinary people.

His longer vision is to build D4TP into the analytical and visualization partner that local newsrooms across America can't afford to build themselves, giving community journalism the data infrastructure that today only exists at the largest national outlets. With the support of the O'Shaughnessy Fellowship, Eric will fully integrate AI into D4TP's workflow, putting it to work for people rather than against them, and doing his part to restore the shared truth that democracy depends on.