Stephanie Chapman is a senior manager at Cornerstone Research. She received her B.A., B.S., and M.A. from the University of Georgia; and she received her Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Shayak Sarkar
Shayak Sarkar is an acting professor of law at the University of California, Davis. Sarkar's scholarship addresses the structure and legal regulation of inequality. His substantive interests lie in financial regulation, employment law, immigration, and taxation. Sarkar clerked for the Hon. Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prior to his clerkship, he practiced as an employment attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, where he focused on domestic workers’ rights. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, his J.D. from Yale Law School, an M.S. in economics for development and an M.S. in evidence-based social intervention from Oxford, and an A.B. in applied mathematics and an A.M. in statistics from Harvard.
Sebastian Sotelo
Sebastian Sotelo is an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research area of focus is international economics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, his M.Res. from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and his B.A. from Universidad del Pacifico.
Scott Nelson
Scott Nelson is an assistant professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Nelson’s research focuses on consumer credit markets, in particular how regulation interacts with information asymmetries and market structure, and how consumers make choices about borrowing, deleveraging, and default. His research uses a range of data sources, including credit reports, credit card account data, surveys, court filings, and employment data, together with models of consumer and firm behavior to understand the drivers of credit market outcomes. His research on the U.S. credit card market was awarded the AQR Top Finance Graduate Award in 2018.
Prior to joining the Booth School of Business, Nelson spent a postdoctoral year with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Princeton University. He has also been a research fellow with the City of Boston Office of Financial Empowerment, a visiting graduate fellow with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow. Nelson earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his studies at MIT, Nelson worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and at Innovations for Poverty Action, where he was a member of the U.S. Household Finance Initiative. He received a B.A. (summa cum laude) in economics and mathematics from Yale College.
Sean Reardon
Sean Reardon is the endowed professor of poverty and inequality in education and is professor of sociology at Stanford University. His research focuses on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality, the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality, and in applied statistical methods for educational research. Reardon is the developer of the Stanford Education Data Archive, or SEDA. Based on 300 million standardized test scores, SEDA provides measures of educational opportunity, average test score performance, academic achievement gaps, and other information for every public school district in the United States. Reardon received his doctorate in education in 1997 from Harvard University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, the National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.
Saravanan Kesavan
Saravanan Kesavan conducts research on supply chain management for retailers, with emphasis on benchmarking operational performance and management of retail store labor. His research topics include improving labor productivity, reducing employee turnover, forecasting performance, designing managerial incentives, and digitization. His research has appeared in Management Science, M&SOM, POM, and Harvard Business Review. He is a senior editor at POMS and an ad hoc reviewer at Management Science, M&SOM, and POMS. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, and other media outlets. Kesavan teaches retail operations and digital operations for MBA students. He has received the “MBA Teaching All Star” award seven times between 2007–2017 and the Weatherspoon Award for Teaching Excellence in the full-time MBA program in 2018. He worked for several years at i2 Technologies, where he helped clients deal with supply chain management issues. He has worked with a number of companies, including The Gap Inc., USAA, Lowe’s Cos., Belk, Texas Instruments Inc., and The Kroger Co. He received his doctorate in technology and operations management from Harvard Business School. He also has master’s and bachelor’s degrees in engineering from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and IIT Madras, India, respectively.
Ryan Sakoda
Ryan Sakoda is an associate professor of law at the University of Iowa. He was a lecturer in law and Bigelow teaching fellow at the University of Chicago. Prior to becoming a Bigelow fellow, Sakoda worked at the Boston public defender’s office as a staff attorney, where he represented indigent criminal defendants facing misdemeanor and felony charges from arrest through final disposition. Before his work as a staff attorney, Sakoda was a Liman Public Interest fellow, also at the Boston public defender’s office, where he advised and represented clients on housing cases that arose from arrests, criminal charges, or past criminal convictions.
Sakoda received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He also received an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics as a Fulbright scholar and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.
Samir Sonti
Samir Sonti is an assistant professor of urban studies at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. He has worked as a political organizer for the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, and as a researcher for UNITE HERE, a union representing hospitality workers in the United States and Canada. Prior to his current position at CUNY, he served as a special advisor on the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders. Sonti holds a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied 20th century U.S. labor and economic history.
Rodney Andrews
Rodney Andrews was a Harvard University Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar; an assistant professor of economics in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas; and director of the Texas Schools Project. He passed away in May 2023. While Dr. Andrews investigated a range of topics including health policy, his recent focus was on the economics of education and, more specifically, the topics of college paths, returns to college quality, and pre-K effects on student achievement. He received his M.A. and Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan, and his B.S. in economics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Robert Manduca
Robert Manduca is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on urban and regional economic development, asking why some places are more prosperous than others and how the economic conditions in which people live shape their life outcomes. Manduca received his Ph.D. in sociology and social policy from Harvard University and his master’s degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.