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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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.
John Kallas
Johnnie Kallas is a Ph.D. candidate in labor relations at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His research explores the changing nature of labor organizing in the United States, with a particular focus on the conditions under which strikes are most effective for workers and their organizations. The main chapter of his dissertation examines strikes and strike outcomes by healthcare workers. He also serves as project director of the ILR Labor Action Tracker, an online database that seeks to overcome limitations in official sources by comprehensively documenting strike activity across the United States. Kallas received his B.A. in politics and history from Oberlin College.
Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith is an associate professor of economics at Georgia State University and a faculty fellow with the Georgia Policy Labs. His research focuses on the behavioral and institutional factors that influence college choice and completion, along with the labor market implications. Prior to Georgia State University, he worked as a policy research scientist at the College Board. Smith received his Ph.D. in economics from Boston University and a B.A. in economics from Tufts University.
Justin Ortagus
Justin C. Ortagus is an associate professor of higher education administration and policy and the director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida. His research typically examines the impact of online education, community colleges, and state policies on the opportunities and outcomes of underserved students. Ortagus has testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor on the role and influence of need-based financial aid for low-income students. He received his Ph.D. in higher education from Pennsylvania State University.
Adam Dean
Adam Dean is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University. His research focuses on the political economy of international trade, labor politics, and the socioeconomic determinants of public health. His second book, Opening Up By Cracking Down, will be published by Cambridge University Press in October 2022. Dean received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Atheendar Venkataramani
Atheendar Venkataramani is an assistant professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and a staff physician at the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. He is a health economist who studies the life-course origins of health and socioeconomic inequality. Venkataramani directs the Penn Opportunity for Health Lab, a research group that seeks to identify policies and interventions that can jointly bolster both economic opportunity and health in the United States. His research, which combines insights from economics, epidemiology, and clinical medicine, spans both domestic and international settings. His work has been published in leading academic journals, such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet, and has been covered widely in media outlets, including The New York Times, Fox News, and The Washington Post. Venkataramani completed his M.D. at Washington University, his Ph.D. in health policy (economics) at Yale University, and his B.S. in biology and economics at Duke University. He completed a residency in internal medicine-global primary care at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
Jamie McCallum
Jamie McCallum is associate professor of sociology at Middlebury College. His research focuses on work and labor issues in the United States and the Global South. His third book, Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice, will be published by Basic Books in November 2022. McCallum received his Ph.D. in sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Kilian Huber
Kilian Huber is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He has studied how shocks to individual firms and households propagate through the economy—for instance, how credit disruptions to some firms spillover to unaffected firms, how house price swings affect household borrowing, and how widespread discrimination affects firm performance. Huber received a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.