Alex Bartik is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include labor economics, public finance, and applied econometrics. His current research uses novel data sources to study the determinants of the labor market outcomes of less-educated workers. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017. Before coming to MIT, he did policy research at the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and managed randomized controlled trials at Innovations for Poverty Action. He grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and graduated from Yale College in 2008.