Rebecca Jack is a Ph.D. candidate in the Economics Department at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. She studies gender, parenthood, and workforce dynamics, and is particularly interested in the ways policy can help support working parents. Her current research investigates the effect of afterschool child care availability for school-age children on maternal employment. She previously worked as the research director for the COVID-19 School Data Hub, where her research on student outcomes and educational equity was published in leading academic journals and cited by policymakers in response to COVID-19. She holds a B.S. in mathematics and an M.P.P. from Brigham Young University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Francisca Alba
Francisca Alba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. She studies how the design of public policy shapes take-up of U.S. social programs—particularly those administered through the tax code—with the aim of improving the delivery of social services. Before joining the Ph.D. program at MSU, she conducted research in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. She received a B.A. in economics and sociology from the University of Edinburgh and an M.P.P. from George Washington University.
Aida Pacheco-Applegate
Aida Pacheco-Applegate is a social policy scholar whose research focuses on early childhood education policy, child care systems, and workforce development, examining how public investments shape the stability, quality, and accessibility of early care and education markets. Using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches, including administrative data analysis, program evaluation, and data visualization, her research examines how policy decisions translate into real-world outcomes across the early childhood education ecosystem. Pacheco-Applegate’s dissertation investigates how private early childhood education providers in Chicago respond to two major policy initiatives: the city’s preschool expansion and the Illinois Smart Start Workforce Grants, a statewide wage-enhancement program. Her broader research agenda examines teacher retention and equity in early childhood education. Current work explores determinants of teacher retention using a nationally representative dataset and reviews evidence on how children’s gender and racial and ethnic identities shape teachers’ perceptions of disruptive behavior and disciplinary practices.
Darien Kearney
Darien Kearney is a Ph.D. student in economics at Howard University whose research examines how racial trauma, financial vulnerability, and structural inequality shape economic decision-making and long-run socioeconomic outcomes. His work sits at the intersection of behavioral economics, stratification economics, and public policy, with a particular focus on how lived experiences of discrimination influence labor market outcomes, educational attainment, and mental health within Black communities. Through his dissertation, Kearney seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms linking racialized stress to economic and social outcomes. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he earned an M.S. in applied economics and management from Cornell University, an M.S. in applied psychology from the University of Southern California, and an M.B.A. in finance and management from Sam Houston State University.
Louis Preonas
Louis Preonas is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is an energy and environmental economist. Much of his research focuses on interacting market distortions in U.S. energy markets, including market power in U.S. coal transportation. He also works at the intersection of environmental and development economics, focusing on the economics of rural electrification and wholesale electricity supply in India. He also studies the intersection of energy, water, and agriculture in California, estimating how farmers respond to increased groundwater pumping costs and extreme heat. Preonas holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.
Joshua Linn
Josh Linn is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at Resources for the Future. His research centers on the effects of environmental policies and economic incentives for new technologies in the transportation, electricity, and industrial sectors. His transportation research assesses passenger vehicle taxation, electric vehicle subsidies, and fuel economy standards in the United States and Europe. He has examined the effects of Beijing’s vehicle ownership restrictions on travel behavior, labor supply, and fertility. Linn’s work on the electricity sector has compared the effectiveness of policy instruments in promoting new technology and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and local air pollutants. He has compared the roles of natural gas prices and environmental regulation in explaining coal mine closures and the shift away from coal-fired generation in the United States. He has examined the implications of low-cost storage for reducing electricity sector emissions, as well as the factors driving electricity demand and implications for retail prices. Linn was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 2014–2015, and he has served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on light-duty fuel economy. He was a co-editor for the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Corbett Grainger
Corbett Grainger is a professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has been on faculty since 2010. His research studies the effects of environmental and resource policies on different stakeholders and households, the political economy of environmental policies, and distributional impacts of market-based environmental and natural resource policies. Grainger teaches courses at the undergraduate and Ph.D. levels in environmental and resource economics, and he is co-editor at Land Economics and a research fellow at CESifo in Munich. He has a Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Morgan Edwards
Morgan Edwards is an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and affiliated faculty with the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. Her research focuses on just energy responses to the climate crisis across policymaking scales. She draws on mixed quantitative and qualitative methods, combining large datasets and community knowledge with systems modeling. Current projects focus on designing policy solutions for equitable building electrification and modeling climate-tech innovation and job transitions. Prior to coming to Madison, she was a president’s postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland. Edwards holds a Ph.D. in data, systems, and society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in technology and policy from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science and economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mokshda Kaul
Mokshda Kaul is a postdoctoral research associate at the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is an incoming assistant professor of energy governance in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her research employs interdisciplinary approaches that integrate economics and political science to examine energy and climate policy from design through implementation. Specifically, she investigates how energy policies can be leveraged to decarbonize energy systems in equitable and inclusive ways. This work currently involves research on energy policies for energy technology deployment, sustainable clean energy production, and fossil fuel worker transitions. Kaul holds a Ph.D. in sustainable energy from the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in economics from Mumbai University in India.
Todd Gerarden
Todd Gerarden is an assistant professor at Cornell University in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. His research interests span energy and environmental economics, public economics, and empirical industrial organization. His recent work focuses on markets for renewable energy and the economics of energy technology innovation. Gerarden obtained a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.