Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. She is also an affiliate at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Marianne was the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. She is a contributor to LeanIn.org, a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and a LinkedIn influencer. She is an author of the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Lean In & McKinsey Women in the Workplace reports on the status of women in corporate America. She is an expert on gender, women’s leadership, diversity and inclusion, financial insecurity, and economic inequality.
At the Lab, she is a core team member of the Institute’s Voice & Influence program, which empowers men and women to excel professionally and provides them with the knowledge and tools to create organizations where all employees thrive. At the Institute, she is also involved in conducting research and designing tools and solutions to increase the number of women leaders in education, industry, and government. Her book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, examines how families are coping in an insecure age. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mark Cooper is director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, where has responsibility for energy, telecommunications, and economic policy analysis. He is a fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, an associated fellow at the Columbia University Institute on Tele-Information, and a fellow at The Donald McGannon Communications Center of Fordham University. Cooper has published several books and hundreds of articles and papers on energy, media, telecommunications, and high-technology industries. He has provided expert testimony more than 250 times for public interest clients including attorneys general, people’s counsels, and citizen interveners before state and federal agencies, courts, and legislators in almost four dozen jurisdictions in the United States and Canada. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a former Yale University and Fulbright fellow.
Liz Hipple is senior policy analyst at the Joint Economic Committee. Previously, she was senior policy advisor at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, where she led Equitable Growth’s work to explore the relationship and connections between inequality and economic mobility. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, she was manager for government affairs at the Economic Innovation Group, a research and advocacy organization focusing on geographic inequality. Additionally, she worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a policy advisor in the Office of Domestic Finance and as a special assistant in the Office of the Chief of Staff. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in political science and public policy.
Lily Batchelder is the Robert C. Kopple Family Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and an affiliated professor at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. She served as deputy director of the White House National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the President under President Obama (2014-2015), and majority chief tax counsel for the US Senate Committee on Finance (2010-2014). Batchelder’s scholarship and teaching focus on personal income taxes, business tax reform, wealth transfer taxes, retirement savings policy, and social insurance. She is on the board of Tax Analysts and the National Tax Association. Before joining NYU in 2005, Batchelder was an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, director of community affairs for a New York state senator, and a client advocate for a small social services organization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn. Batchelder received a B.A. in political science with honors and distinction from Stanford University, an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Kendra Bischoff is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Her primary research interests relate to the intersection of neighborhoods and schools. In one area of research, she studies the patterns, the causes, and the consequences of racial and socioeconomic residential segregation. Her work has documented patterns in income segregation over time in the United States, and has shown that rising income inequality has contributed to an increase in income segregation among American families. Her work has also shown that the fragmentation of school districts is related to elevated racial segregation, indicating that political boundaries are an important mechanism leading to segregated institutions. A second line of research examines the relationship between elementary and secondary school enrollment decisions and neighborhood contexts, such as the levels and geographic patterns of social inequality among residents and the prevalence of school choice options. She also has an ongoing interest in the role of schools in fostering civic engagement and citizenship, and in how unequal school environments shape opportunities for civic education.
Kimberly Clausing is the Eric M. Zolt Chair of Tax Law and Policy at the University of California Law school. During the first part of the Biden Administration, Clausing was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis in the US Department of the Treasury, serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy. Prior to UCLA, she was the Thormund Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at Reed College, where she taught international trade, international finance, and public finance. Her research studies the taxation of multinational firms. Clausing received her B.A. from Carleton College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University—all in economics.
Kea Fiedler passed away in 2016. She was a PhD student in the Public and Urban Policy program at the New School’s Milano School for International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy. She was interested in the ways in which public policies and collective action can reduce economic inequality. Her work mainly focused on labor market policies and industrial relations in an international/comparative perspective. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Bremen University in Germany and a Master’s in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, United Kingdom.
Kavya Vaghul was a Senior Research Analyst at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Kavya worked as a consultant for the City of Redmond, Washington and served as a legislative intern with Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state. Kavya graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in 2013 with a degree in Public Health with concentrations in statistics and international development.
Kate Bahn is the research director of WorkRise at The Urban Institute. Previously, she was the director of labor market policy and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Her areas of research include gender, race, and ethnicity in the labor market, care work, and monopsonistic labor markets. Before Equitable Growth, Bahn was an economist at the Center for American Progress, and she served as the executive vice president and secretary for the International Association for Feminist Economics. Bahn received her Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research and her B.A. from Hampshire College.
Julien Lafortune is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specializes in K–12 education. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
