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.
Expert Type: Grantee
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 associate professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University and a nonresident scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. 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.
Adrienne Jones
Adrienne Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint public policy and sociology program at Duke University. Her research interests include stratification, inequality, and mobility, which she examines through the lens of employment, training, and public policy. She is particularly interested in the employment and training experiences of Black workers living in the American South. Jones’ dissertation project examines how driver’s license suspensions structure opportunities for mobility among participants of the Durham Expunction and Restoration Project’s Second Chance Driving program. She received a B.A. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011 and a master’s degree in public policy from the Sanford School at Duke University in 2014.
Dilan Eren
Dilan Eren is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Boston University. She works at the intersection of work, occupations, and organizations by adopting a cultural sociology lens to examine topics of social inequality. Her dissertation, “The Self-Taught Economy: Open-Access and Inclusion in the Tech Industry,” studies how aspiring developers without a computer science degree make sense of and use open access to coding skills to get jobs in tech. She adopts a longitudinal perspective and uses multiple methods, including surveys, in-depth interviews, and digital ethnography and observations, to understand how open access to coding initiatives may or may not alter the existing regimes of inequalities and make tech more or less diverse. Eren holds both a B.A. and an M.A. in sociology from Bogazici University in Turkey.
Mario Leccese
Mario Leccese is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research is in the areas of industrial organization, innovation, and information economics. In particular, it focuses on the determinants of market power, its role in preventing markets to function efficiently, and what public policies can do to promote competition and innovation. The main chapter of his dissertation examines the relationship between venture capitalists’ common ownership of competing technology ventures and ventures’ outcomes. Leccese received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in economics from Bocconi University, and his M.A. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.