Wenfei Xu is an assistant professor in Cornell University's City and Regional Planning Department in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She is also the director of the Urban Data Research Lab. Her research questions how housing policies, practices, institutions, and technologies have shaped urban inequality, with an orientation toward methods in urban analytics. She works on topics in social-spatial stratification, segregation, race and ethnicity, data science, mapping, and neighborhood change in the United States. Her work has ranged from an interest in the historical legacies of structural housing discrimination and its contemporary spatial-temporal manifestations to exploring the uses of big data in characterizing human activity for urban social science research. Xu received her Ph.D. in urban planning from Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, a dual master’s degree in architecture and urban planning from MIT's Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a Bachelor's of Arts in economics from the University of Chicago.
Expert Type: Grantee
Leah Hamilton
Leah Hamilton is the principal investigator of the Family Economic Policy Lab. She is an associate professor of social work at Appalachian State University, a senior fellow at the Jain Family Institute, and a faculty affiliate at the Social Policy Institute of Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches social welfare policy and conducts research on economic justice and basic income. Her book, Welfare Doesn't Work: The Promises of Basic Income for a Failed American Safety Net, was released in 2020. Currently, Hamilton is principal investigator for multiple basic/guaranteed income pilots in New York and Georgia. Her work has been featured in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, NPR, Fortune, and Fast Company. She serves on the policy council for the Humanity Forward Foundation and formerly served on the Basic Income Earth Network board and as president of the ACLU-NC.
Stephen Roll
Stephen Roll is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. His work focuses on promoting asset building, debt management, and economic security in lower-income populations. Most recently, his work has examined the role of cash-transfer programs in improving household balance sheets and economic mobility outcomes, including studies of the Expanded Child Tax Credit and several Guaranteed Income experiments. He is also leading the new Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility Project, which examines how low-wage workers navigate public and private benefits programs to achieve financial security. His work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, and he has briefed the White House Domestic Policy Council, the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee, and the U.S. Supreme Court on the results of his research. Roll received his Ph.D. in public policy and management from The Ohio State University.
Brandon Enriquez
Brandon Enriquez is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Maryland Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He is a labor economist who primarily focuses on the causes and consequences of racial inequality. During the 2021–2022 school year, he was on leave at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Enriquez graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with his Ph.D. in 2024.
Camilla Schneier
Camilla Schneier is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Chicago. Her research explores competition and consumer outcomes in the food industry. Broadly, she is interested in industrial organization and macroeconomics. Between 2017 and 2019, she was a research assistant in macroeconomics at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Before that, she studied economics and physics, and minored in mathematics, at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yixin Sun
Yixin Sun is a Ph.D candidate in economics at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests in development, environment, and food policy. Prior to her Ph.D., she worked as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago. She also holds a B.A. in economic statistics from Columbia University.
Donn. L. Feir
Donn. L. Feir is an applied labor economist and economic historian who has published on reconciliation, modern Indigenous labor market experiences, health, and the impact of historic policies on Indigenous economies and people. Feir is an Associate Professor at the University of Victoria, and a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Feir received their Ph.D. from the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia.
Samuel L. Myers Jr.
Samuel L. Myers, Jr. is the director of and professor in the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. He has published extensively on applied microeconomic and policy issues in leading economics and interdisciplinary journals and books. Myers is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration; a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management; the former chair of the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering; and a former president of the National Economic Association. He holds concurrent appointments in the applied economics Ph.D. program and the graduate minor in population studies at the University of Minnesota. Myers received his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mario Small
Mario L. Small is Quetelet professor of social science at Columbia University. An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Small is an expert on social inequality, neighborhoods, social networks, and the relationship between qualitative and quantitative methods. His books include Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio, Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life, Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice, and (with Jessica Calarco) Qualitative Literacy: A Guide for Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. He has testified on social capital and inequality before the U.S. Senate. Small received his B.A. in sociology/anthropology from Carleton College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University.
Tridevi Chakma
Tridevi Chakma is a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at Harvard University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Environmental Economics program. She is also an affiliate of the Environmental Inequality Lab. Her research interests lie in the intersection of environmental economics and public finance, with a focus on the causes and consequences of environmental inequality. Her current projects document racial disparities in heat exposure and examine the drivers of heat disparities in the United States. Prior to the Ph.D. program, Chakma worked at Oxera Consulting. She completed an M.Sc. in finance and economics at the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree in finance at the Australian National University.