Faculty

Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College. Her primary interests concern improving access to education in developing countries, particularly at the intersection of education and health.  Her current work examines the impact of sanitation on education and health outcomes in rural Indian schools.

Ashworth’s recent research has examined the welfare economics of campaign finance, the sources of the incumbency advantage, the media’s influence on policy choice, and some methodological pitfalls in the study of suicide terrorism. His current research has two main foci. The first uses nonstandard models of beliefs to study issues including optimal delegation and targeting in electoral campaigns. The second uses canonical ideas from the theory of contracts to study the impact of domestic politics on international conflict.

Before joining Chicago Harris, Ashworth was an assistant professor in the department of government at Harvard University and in the department of politics at Princeton University. Ashworth received his B.S. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Maria Bautista is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Maria’s research focuses on the political, economic and social consequences of state-led repression. Her PhD dissertation studied the case of military dictatorship in Chile based on a unique dataset she collected and explores the extent to which repression affected individual political preferences, behavior and economic outcomes by comparing subjects who were victims of political torture or imprisonment by the state to subjects who did not. She also studies the heterogeneous effects and the intergenerational consequences of repression.

Christopher R. Berry is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  His research interests are in the political economy of American local government and the politics of federal spending. He is currently engaged in two major lines of research. The first explores how the institutional design of local government influences political accountability and public policy. The second is an analysis of the ways in which executive and legislative politics influence the geographic distribution of federal outlays. Professor Berry is the author of Imperfect Union: Representation and Taxation in Multilevel Governments, published by Cambridge University Press, as well as many other scholarly publications. For access to Professor Berry’s writings, please visit his research web page.

Prior to joining Chicago Harris, Berry was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Government's Program on Education Policy and Governance. He received his BA from Vassar College, Master of Regional Planning (MRP) from Cornell University, and PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Professor Berry is also active in community development and was formerly a director in the MetroEdge division of ShoreBank, America's oldest and largest community development financial institution.

Zarek Brot-Goldberg is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His work is concerned with market structure, organizational structure, and regulatory design in the U.S. health care sector. In prior and ongoing research, he has studied the efficiency of high-deductible health plans in reducing health care spending; the effects of vertical integration in physician markets on patient referral patterns; the extent of ‘mistakes’ in insurance choice in Medicare Part D; and measuring the costs and benefits of paperwork for physicians. He received the NIHCM Foundation Research Award for best health economics research paper in 2018. He received his PhD in economics from UC Berkeley in 2019, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is the Dean and Sydney Stein Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and a Faculty Associate in the University of Chicago Department of Political Science.

A leading political scientist whose research applies game theoretic models to the study of conflict, political violence, national security, and electoral politics, he has also written extensively on methodological issues in the social sciences. He writes and advises leaders in the public and private sectors on both national security matters and issues at the intersection of technology and society.

Before coming to Chicago Harris, Bueno de Mesquita taught in the department of political science at Washington University in St. Louis and was a Lady David Fellow in political science and visiting fellow in the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundations, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace. Bueno de Mesquita received his BA in political science from the University of Chicago and his MA and PhD in political science from Harvard.

Fiona Burling is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She studies energy and environmental economics, with a focus on the developing world. Her recent research examines the impacts of rural electrification in India, uses machine learning methods to quantify the effectiveness of energy efficiency upgrades, and proposes tools for designing randomized controlled trials. Prior to joining Harris, Fiona was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics and Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago. She holds a PhD in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in economics, political science, and German from Williams College.

John Burrows is senior lecturer in leadership at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and an associate fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. He also teaches healthcare leadership in a newly launched double masters degree program in health policy taught jointly by the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics & Political Science. Previously, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Before entering academia, John’s career spanned the public, private, and NGO sectors. He originally came to the USA from the UK to volunteer at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Mississippi Capital Defense Resource Project. During college he interned with other anti-death penalty groups and also at the Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC. Later he joined Arthur Andersen’s Office of Government Service (OGS) and led engagements with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

John later switched into the private sector, where he was a partner with the consulting firm Accenture and held senior roles in sales and marketing at enterprise software companies including Siebel and Oracle. He negotiated, sold, managed, and implemented complex, multi-national, multi-million dollar projects around the globe, and gained experience building and growing operations in the UK, USA, and Japan, grappling with all that that entails: BD, IJVs, M&A, etc. During his PhD studies John served as an advisor for Houses for Africa, a social enterprise firm based in Cape Town, South Africa.

At the University of Chicago and Oxford, John teaches leadership, negotiations, strategy, decision-making, and organizational psychology to MPP, MBA, and MA students, and to senior executives in open enrollment and custom executive-education programs. Custom executive education clients of John's include AbbVie, Alfa, American College of Surgeons, American Orthopaedic Association, Aon, BBVA, Brainlab, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), Civil Service Bureau of Hong Kong, Edelman, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), Kiewit, Kuwait University College of Business Administration, Merrill Lynch, State Farm, Syngenta, Trelleborg, and Workiva. 

John received a Ph.D. and M.B.A. from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and an A.B. from Vassar College.

Martin Castillo Quintana is an assistant professor who studies the relationship between violent conflict, policymaking, and politics, with a methodological emphasis on formal theory. He develops and applies game-theoretic models to understand the effects of different policies on the conflict behavior of violent actors. He also studies how violence influences politics and how politics shape policymaking. His current research delves into how organized criminal groups fight each other and their interactions with government and state authorities. He earned his Ph.D. in Politics from New York University in 2023 and holds a B.S. in Mathematical Engineering and an M.A. in Applied Economics from the University of Chile.

Chris Clapp is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. His research interests are in applied microeconomics, primarily the fields of public, urban, environmental, and labor economics.  Clapp has also done work related to health and sports economics topics.

Prior to working at UChicago, Dr. Clapp majored in Economics and English at Clemson University and worked as a research associate for Compass Lexecon in Washington, DC. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Virginia, and was previously employed as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University.  

Thomas Coleman returned to the University of Chicago, first as Executive Director and Senior Advisor at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and then in 2015 as lecturer at Harris. Prior to returning to the University of Chicago, Coleman worked in the finance industry for over twenty years, with considerable experience in trading, risk management, and quantitative modeling. Positions included head of Quantitative Analysis and Risk Control at Moore Capital Management, LLC; a director and founding member of Aequilibrium Investments, Ltd., a London-based hedge fund manager; roles on the sell side in fixed income derivatives research and trading at TMG Financial Products, Lehman Brothers, and S.G. Warburg in London.

Coleman is the author of Quantitative Risk Management, published by Wiley and A Practical Guide to Risk Management published by the Research Foundation of the CFA Institute. Before entering the financial industry, Coleman was an academic, teaching graduate and undergraduate economics and finance at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Coleman earned his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago, and his BA in physics from Harvard.

Don L. Coursey is the Ameritech Professor of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College and served as dean of Chicago Harris from 1996 to 1998. He is an experimental economist whose research elicits reliable measures of preferences and monetary values for public goods, such as environmental quality. Coursey’s research has focused on demand for international environmental quality, environmental legislation in the United States, and public preferences for environmental outcomes relative to other social and economic goals.

Coursey led an investigation of environmental equity in Chicago, documenting the prevalence of hazardous industrial sites in poor, minority neighborhoods. He has examined public expenditures on endangered species. He has also consulted with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill to develop federal response guidelines for environmental disasters.

He received both a B.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona and has previously taught at the University of Wyoming and Washington University in St. Louis, MO. He has received the Burlington-Northern Foundation Award for Distinguished Achievement in Teaching, Greater St. Louis Award for Excellence in University Teaching, John M. Olin School of Business Teacher of the Year Award in 1989 and 1990, and has been named Professor of the Year for six consecutive years by Chicago Harris students.

Oeindrila Dube is the Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Oeindrila Dube’s research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of conflict and crime in the developing world.

Dube’s current research interests include studying the role of employment opportunities in engaging at-risk Muslim youth, understanding the role of trauma in post-conflict recovery, and analyzing the role of gender in conflict. Through this research agenda, she aims to help advance the Pearson Institute’s goal of incubating new strategies for curbing violence worldwide.

In past work, Dube has examined how commodity price shocks influence civil war in Colombia, documented how the availability of guns from the US promotes violent crime in Mexico, and experimentally evaluated the effects of post-conflict reconciliation in Sierra Leone.

Dube’s research affiliations include the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the International Growth Center, and the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Previously, Dube was an assistant professor of politics and economics at New York University and a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Global Development. She holds a PhD in public policy from Harvard University, an MPhil in economics from the University of Oxford, and a BA in public policy from Stanford University. She also received a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002.

Steven Durlauf is Steans Professor in Education Policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Steven’s research spans many topics in microeconomics and macroeconomics. His most important substantive contributions involve the areas of poverty, inequality and economic growth. Much of his research has attempted to integrate sociological ideas into economic analysis. His major methodological contributions include both economic theory and econometrics. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modelling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for the empirical analogs of these models. Other research has focused on techniques for monetary policy evaluation. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by economists and other social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.

Prior to joining Harris, Steven was the William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Durlauf is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has held previous positions at Stanford University; University of California, Los Angeles; Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro; the Santa Fe Institute; and Federal Reserve, among others.

Durlauf graduated magna cum laude with a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980. He went on to earn his doctorate from Yale in 1986.

Wioletta Dziuda is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Her main interests lie in applied game theory, political economy and the economics of information. 

Anthony Fowler is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. His research focuses on difficult causal questions about political representation. When and to what extent do advanced democracies represent or fail to represent the preferences of their citizens? What policy interventions can improve representation? He designs randomized experiments, searches for natural experiments, and develops new tools to address these questions.

Eyal Frank is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. As an environmental economist, he works at the intersection of ecology and economics. His work addresses three broad questions: (i) how do natural inputs, namely animals, contribute to different production functions of interest, (ii) how do market dynamics reduce natural habitats and lead to declining wildlife population levels, and (iii) what are the costs, indirect ones in particular, of conservation policies. 

These areas of research present a causal inference challenge as manipulating ecosystems and species at large scales is often infeasible. In his work, Frank draws natural experiments from ecology and policy, and uses econometric techniques to estimate different pieces of the puzzle regarding the social cost of biodiversity losses. 

Prior to the University of Chicago, Frank was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development from Columbia University, and earned his M.A. in Economics and B.Sc. in Environmental Sciences and Economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ingvil Gaarder is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Her research applies microeconomic theory and microdata to study the differential effects of government policies on individuals. In one paper, she uses a natural experiment in Norway to examine the incidence and distributional effects of consumption taxes across households. A second strand of research has studied the effect on wage and employment outcomes resulting from the interaction of new technology with different worker skill levels.

Ingvil graduated in 2014 from the European University Institute in Florence with a Ph.D. in Economics. She earned her MSc from University of Oslo. Prior to Harris, Ingvil held positions as Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London and Research Associate at the Department of Economics, University of Chicago.

Yana Gallen is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She received a PhD in economics from Northwestern University in 2016. She is a labor economist studying the gender wage gap. Her research focuses on understanding the sources of the gender pay gap---preferences, discrimination, or productivity? She is also interested in the impact of family friendly policies on the labor market, particularly looking at indirect or unanticipated effects of policy reforms. Many of her projects use Danish register data linking workers and firms. Her current work focuses on the savings and career decisions of household before they know their preferences concerning child-rearing.

Peter Ganong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He studies how households manage difficult financial circumstances such as unemployment and having an underwater mortgage. He also helped start immigrantdoctors.org. He received a BA in 2009 and a PhD in 2016, both in economics from Harvard. He worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010 and helped to start the City of Boston's Citywide Analytics Team from 2014 to 2015. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 2016 to 2017.

Scott Gehlbach is Professor, Department of Political Science and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. A political economist and comparativist, Gehlbach’s work is motivated by the contemporary and historical experience of Russia, Ukraine, and other postcommunist states. He has made numerous contributions to the study of autocracy, economic reform, political connections, and other important topics in political economy. Known for employing a wide range of methods in his research, Gehlbach has contributed to graduate education through his widely used textbook Formal Models of Domestic Politics. He is the author or coauthor of many articles in top journals, including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics; the award-winning monograph Representation Through Taxation: Revenue, Politics, and Development in Postcommunist States; and the forthcoming Cambridge Element Reform and Rebellion in Weak States.

Prior to coming to Chicago, Gehlbach was faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for sixteen years. He has at various times been affiliated with both the New Economic School and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. For the 2019–20 academic year, he is Visiting Professor, Economics Department, Sciences Po. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, two Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, and many other grants. He has been honored for his scholarship through numerous awards, including most recently the Michael Wallerstein Award for best article in political economy. Among other service to the profession, he is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science and organizer of the annual Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy of Russia. Gehlbach received his PhD in political science and economics from the University of California–Berkeley.

Joshua Gottlieb is an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  His research in applied microeconomics focuses on the economics of the health care system, including the organization of insurance markets, physician behavior, administrative costs, and implications for labor economics.  Gottlieb also conducts research in public finance more broadly, including urban and health economics.  He is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

Gottlieb has published in academic journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Labor Economics.   He won the 2015 Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics and the 2012 National Tax Association Dissertation Award for this work.  

Gottlieb’s research focuses on questions directly relevant to public policy.  He was instrumental in developing and promoting a novel property tax scheme, which influenced housing policy in British Columbia.

Gottlieb completed his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University in 2012.  He was previously an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University.  He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics, the Director of the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC), and Dierector of the Becker Friedman Institute (BFI). His research largely focuses on environmental and energy economics.  Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, Professor Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Economics at MIT.  Among Professor Greenstone's many honors, he is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Faculty Director of the E2e Project; Director of the Climate Change, Environment and Natural Resources Research Programme of the International Growth Centre; a Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution; and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Jeffrey Grogger, the Irving Harris Professor in Urban Policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, is one of the nation’s leading experts on welfare reform. He specializes in labor economics, applied microeconomics, applied econometrics, and economics of crime. His recent work includes projects on international migration and racial inequality. For his work on racial profiling, he received the Outstanding Statistical Application Award for 2007 from the American Statistical Association.

Grogger received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego. He was a coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources from 1996 to 2008. Before joining Chicago Harris, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Grogger has also been a research fellow in the Office of the Attorney General of the State of California. He is the chair of the National Longitudinal Surveys Technical Review Committee, a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (Bonn, Germany).

William Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the College, and the director of the Center for Effective Government. He has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on Obama's education initiatives, distributive politics, and the normative foundations of executive power.

Amir Jina is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. An environmental and development economist, his research focuses on the role of the environment and environmental change in the shaping how societies develop. He uses applied economic techniques combined with methods from climate science and remote sensing to understand the impacts of climate in both rich and poor countries, and has conducted fieldwork related to climate change adaptation with communities in India, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda.

Prior to University of Chicago, Amir was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley where he worked on the economic analysis of the Risky Business initiative, an independent assessment of the economic risks posed by a changing climate in the U.S. He is a founding member of the Climate Impact Lab - an interdisciplinary collaboration examining the socioeconomic impacts of climate change around the world. Amir was also a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Economics Department of University of Chicago, and a Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago (EPIC).

Amir received his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development and M.A. in Climate and Society both from Columbia University, B.A.s in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Trinity College, Dublin, and previously worked with the Red Cross/Red Crescent in South Asia.

Damon Jones is an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He conducts research at the intersection of public finance, household finance and behavioral economics. In his current research, he examines how the timing of income taxation affects household income flows and by extension household consumption patterns and financial decisions. These findings are in turn used to test models of behavioral biases in decision making, such as impatience and self-control.

Dmitri Koustas is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. His research covers a variety of topics in labor economics and macroeconomics. An important vein of his research focuses on measuring and understanding the reasons why households participate in alternative work arrangements like the gig economy. To this end, his research pioneers new and innovative datasets, including microtransactions from an online personal financial aggregator and bill-paying application, IRS tax returns, and direct partnerships with technology companies. 

Navin Kumar is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His work is concerned with the impact of public policies and natural disasters.

Gregory Lane is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is a development economist with a current research focus on innovations in finance, technology, and labor markets in developing countries. He has current research projects on promoting public bus safety in Kenya, social protection for refugees, and on-line job portals in India.

Prior to joining Harris Greg was an Assistant Professor at American University. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics in 2019.

Jeff Levy is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  His background is in applied policy research, working at the intersection of social science and data science.  His policy career started out at the Brookings Institution, followed by the data science and research programming team at the Urban Institute, where he worked on a wide range of projects on topics including state economies, non-profits, incarceration and the parole system.  At Harris, Levy teaches both microeconomics, and the core sequence on programming and data skills.  His own research has focused on economic uncertainty, particularly around the Great Recession.

He holds a BA in economics and political science from Michigan State University, and an MA and PhD in economics from American University in Washington, DC.

Sheng-Hao Lo is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he teaches core courses in Statistics, Data Analytics and Microeconomics. He has a broad set of teaching and research interests in applied microeconomics and applied econometrics, with a focus on health policy. In particular, he is interested in studying hospital--patient agency issues in the context of different healthcare systems, as well as how governments respond to the issues under existing regulations.

During his time as a PhD student, Sheng-Hao has served as a head teaching assistant for the Department of Economics, Harris School of Public Policy, Financial Mathematics, and Booth School of Business. In 2016, he was the solo winner of the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Economics.

Sheng-Hao holds a PhD and MA in Economics from the University of Chicago, and a BS in Electrical Engineering and BA in Economics from National Taiwan University.

Jens Ludwig is the McCormick Foundation Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy in the School of Social Service Administration and the Harris School of Public Policy, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and co-director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Lab. He also serves as a non-resident senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and co-director of the NBER's working group on the economics of crime. His research focuses on social policy, particularly in the areas of urban poverty, crime, and education.

David O. Meltzer is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and Chair of the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science at The University of Chicago, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, and affiliated faculty of Chicago Harris and the Department of Economics. Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost and quality of hospital care. Meltzer has performed randomized trials comparing the use of doctors who specialize in inpatient care (“hospitalists”). He is currently leading a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation Challenge award to study the effects of improved continuity in the doctor patient relationship between the inpatient and outpatient setting on the costs and outcomes of care for frequently hospitalized Medicare patients. He led the formation of the Chicago Learning Effectiveness Advancement Research Network (Chicago LEARN) that helped pioneer collaboration of Chicago-Area academic medical centers in hospital-based comparative effectiveness research and the recent support of the Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network (CAPriCORN) by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Alicia S. Menendez is a Research Associate and Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics, and a Principal Research Scientist at the NORC. At Harris, she also leads the International Policy Practicum, which provides real-world international policy experience to a select group of Chicago Harris students. 

Bruce Meyer, the McCormick Foundation Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, studies poverty and inequality, tax policy, government safety net programs such as unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, food stamps, and Medicaid, and the accuracy of household surveys.  His most recent work includes research on trends in poverty and inequality, the consequences of disability, the effects of Medicaid, and the reporting in surveys of government programs such as food stamps.  

Colm A. O’Muircheartaigh is a professor and previous dean of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, as well as a senior fellow in the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). O'Muircheartaigh's research encompasses survey sample design, measurement errors in surveys, cognitive aspects of question wording, and latent variable models for nonresponse. He is principal investigator on the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Internet Panel Recruitment Survey, and co-principal investigator on NSF's Data Research and Development Center and the National Institute on Aging's National Social Life Health and Aging Project (NSHAP). He is also responsible for the development of methodological innovations in sample design for NORC's face-to-face surveys in the U.S.

Carolin Pflueger is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research is at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, with a particular focus on understanding the fiscal and monetary policy drivers of bond markets.

On the theory side, she has proposed a new integrated model of macroeconomic dynamics for stocks and bonds.  On the empirical side she has worked on developing a new measure of risk appetite for the macroeconomy. She is also interested in understanding how the interdependence of fiscal and monetary policy theory can raise governments’ cost of borrowing, especially in emerging markets.

Her research has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Journal of Monetary Economics. She won the Arthur Warga Award for the Best Paper in Fixed Income at the SFS Cavalcade 2014 and was a finalist for the AQR Insight Award 2018. Her work is policy relevant and has been presented at the Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury Department, and the Bank of Canada, and has been influential for asset allocation at the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund.

She received her PhD in Business Economics from Harvard in 2012 and was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of British Columbia from 2012 until 2019. She previously held visiting positions at the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, MIT Sloan, Brown University, and the San Francisco Federal Reserve.

Zhaosong Ruan is an Assistant Instructional Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. He teaches courses in analytical politics and politics in weakly institutionalized and developing countries. His teaching and research interest broadly encompasses formal theories in political economy, with a focus on nondemocratic politics, bureaucracy, and the political economy of development. During his time as a PhD student at the Harris School, Zhaosong served as head teaching assistants for various courses including Analytical Politics I and II (MPP), and Political Economy I and II (PhD). Zhaosong holds PhD and MPP from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and a BSSc (Bachelor of Social Science) degree in Economics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Lesley J. Turner is an Associate Professor, faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and CESifo research affiliate. Her research broadly considers the roles that government should play in providing, financing, and regulating education. Recent work examines how the incentives built into the current structure of the financing of higher education affects students and colleges, and the implications these responses have for students’ educational attainment, labor market outcomes, and financial wellbeing. She served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary and Office of the Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Education in 2022 and as an education fellow in the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in 2018-19. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Dr. Turner was an Associate Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. She holds a joint B.A./M.P.P. program from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University. 

Shaoda Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is an applied economist with research interests in development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. His main research agenda aims at understanding the political economy of public policy (design, implementation, effectiveness), with a regional focus on China.

He holds a BA from Peking University, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Harris, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics and Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago.

Rebecca Wolfe is a Senior Lecturer at the Harris School for Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where she also is an associate at the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. Prior to joining the faculty at Chicago, she led research and program development related to conflict and fragility at Mercy Corps, an international development and humanitarian agency. Dr. Wolfe is able to draw on her extensive practitioner and academic backgrounds to effectively research important development issues, design interventions that are theoretically grounded and evidence based, and communicate both to multiple audiences. Over her career, she has developed conflict prevention and violence reduction programs globally, including Kenya’s largest youth development program, gang violence prevention in Guatemala City, countering violent extremism programs in Nigeria and Yemen, and community-based conflict management interventions in Iraq, Syria, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Tajikistan. She has also published research on why young people engage in violence and how development interventions can be designed to reduce this support. She was a Fellow at Yale University’s Political Violence Field Lab and currently is an affiliate at NYU’s Steinhardt School. Dr. Wolfe has taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and at the Wagner School for Public Service at New York University. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard University.

Kim Wolske is a research associate and assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and a fellow with the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC). Her work draws on the fields of environmental, social, and cognitive psychology to examine the behavioral dimensions of energy issues, with an eye toward improving the design of public-facing policies and programs. Most recently she collaborated with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy's Sunshot Initiative to investigate strategies for lowering the soft costs of residential rooftop solar. Other research examines how different ways of framing climate change solutions may influence public perceptions of the issue and support for mitigation and adaption policies.

Wolske previously worked as a researcher with the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and as an independent consultant to Opower. She received a BA in environmental studies from Connecticut College, an MS in natural resource policy and behavior from the School of Natural Resources & Environment at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in environmental psychology, also from the University of Michigan. 

Paula R. Worthington is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she teaches classes in state and local public finance and cost-benefit analysis.  At Harris, she is actively involved in teaching, advising, and programming as part of the Municipal Finance Certificate program and related initiatives.  She received her PhD in economics from Northwestern University in 1988; has served as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a research officer, economic advisor, and senior research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; and has published articles in academic journals, Federal Reserve publications, and other outlets. Immediately prior to joining Chicago Harris, Worthington taught as a lecturer in the economics department at Northwestern University. Her recent service activities include membership on the Metropolitan Planning Council’s Regional Planning and Investments Committee (2010-present); the Illinois Tax Foundation’s Research Advisory Council (2009-present); the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's Financial Plan Resource Group (2008-2009); and Evanston/Skokie School District 65's Citizens' Budget Committee (2003-2004). Worthington is an eight-time recipient of the Chicago Harris Public Policy Student Association's Best Teacher in a Non-Core Class Award.

Austin Wright is an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He is a faculty affiliate of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, and non-resident fellow of the Liechtenstein Institute. His research leverages microlevel data to study the political economy of conflict and crime in Afghanistan, Colombia, Indonesia, and Iraq. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Niehaus Center for Global Governance, The Asia Foundation, and World Bank. He received his BA in Government and Sociology and BS in Communication Sciences from The University of Texas at Austin and his MA and PhD in Politics from Princeton University.

Adam Zelizer is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He studies legislative politics, with a focus on causal inference. His research examines how legislators make decisions – for example, how they acquire expertise from policy research and influence one another through deliberation – and the effects of individual decision-making processes on policy outcomes. One goal of this research is to figure out which legislative processes work, in the sense of leading to more informed, effective, and broadly-supported public policies, and which don’t.

He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2018. He also holds a BA in Political Economy from Columbia University. He joins Harris as an Assistant Professor after spending a year as a postdoctoral researcher and instructor at Harris, during which he taught Analytical Politics II and Field Experiments for Public Policy. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Cato Institute, Open Society Foundations, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.