Postdoctoral Research Scholars

Tristan is a fifth-year PhD Candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, their research stands at the intersection of environmental economics, empirical industrial organization and labor economics.

Prior to joining Columbia, they earned master degrees in Quantitative Economics from the Paris School of Economics, and in International Relations from Sciences-Po, as well as bachelor degrees in Political Sciences (Sciences-Po), Law (Paris 1 - Sorbonne), Philosophy (Paris 10 - Nanterre), and interrupted a bachelor in Mathematics during its last year at Paris 6 - UPMC.

They also worked for a public policy consulting cabinet in Brussels, Belgium - specifically on European Union policy for the year 2013-2014, and worked one semester for the French Treasury’s office within the French Embassy in Bucharest, Romania.

Suresh Naidu is Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

He has a B.Math in Pure Mathematics from the Unversity of Waterloo, a MA in economics from the University of Massachussetts-Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008-2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. He works on political economy and historical labor markets. He has interests in the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and labor organizing. In addition to being a faculty Co-director for the Center for Political Economy, he is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Seokju is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. His research interests lie at the intersections of U.S. foreign relations, political economy, and international thought. His dissertation project interrogates the relationship between regional economic convergence across the U.S. and the U.S.’s turn to globalism in the mid-twentieth century, with a focus on policy intellectuals and lawmakers in Congress. More generally, Seokju is interested in historiography as a form of political thought.

Premilla Nadasen has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color fought for social justice. Her most recent book, Household Workers Unite, examines how African American domestic workers in the U.S. strategically used storytelling to develop a political identity and through their organizing reshaped the landscape of labor organizing. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.

Nadasen is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and serves on the scholarly advisory committee of the New York Historical Society's Center for Women's History. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association and was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Oxford University in 2019. She is the 2020 inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize for outstanding feminist activist and intellectual work.

Professor Nadasen has bridged academic and activist work by making her scholarship accessible to people outside the university. She has been a museum consultant, has written op-eds for newspapers and on-line outlets, and served as expert witness before the New York State Assembly Committee on Labor as well as the federal Department of Labor.  She collaborated with the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Domestic Workers Alliance on the “We Dream in Black Project” to mobilize Black domestic workers in the South.

Known for her distinguished scholarship in civil procedure, legislation, and anti-discrimination law, Olatunde C.A. Johnson is equally committed to cultivating the next generation of civic-minded lawyers. In the classroom, Johnson draws on her background in legal practice and government service to illustrate how social change can be effected through litigation as well as problem-solving outside the courtroom. 

Johnson’s research has helped shape the national conversation on modern civil rights legislation, anti-discrimination, fair housing, congressional power, and innovations to address discrimination and inequality. Her recent work examines state and local governments’ efforts to enhance opportunities for historically excluded groups as well as the conflicts that arise when states preempt local efforts to address discrimination and promote wage increases and affordable housing. Together with a group of students, Johnson produced Through the Gale, the 2022 podcast that explored the role of lawyers in the struggle for multiracial democracy.

In 2016, Johnson was awarded the Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Columbia University’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. In 2009, Columbia Law School students selected Johnson as the Public Interest Professor of the Year, praising her as a “role model for aspiring public interest lawyers.” In February 2020, she was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to the Resolutions Committee honoring Justice John Paul Stevens, for whom she clerked.

Nearly a decade after she joined the Columbia Law School faculty, in 2006, Johnson was appointed vice dean for Intellectual Life for the 2016–2018 term. In that role, she organized a wide range of events designed to engage the Law School community, from a Lawyers, Community, and Impact panel on recent developments in U.S. law and politics to a roundtable discussion on integration in America, faculty film series, and a book talk.

Johnson brings extensive public service experience to her work at Columbia Law School, including clerking for Judge David Tatel on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1997 to 2001, Johnson worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she conducted trial- and appellate-level litigation to promote racial and ethnic equity in employment, health, and higher education. From 2001 to 2003, she served as constitutional and civil rights counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, then as a senior consultant on racial justice in the ACLU’s National Legal Department from 2003 to 2004.

In 2017, Johnson was elected a member of the American Law Institute.

Nicolas Longuet-Marx is a Ph.D. student in Sustainable Development at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Before joining Columbia, he earned a Master's degree in Economics from the Paris School of Economics and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Paris Sciences et Lettres. He also worked for the French Development Agency (AFD) at their Central Asia regional office in Tashkent, Uzbekistan where he was working on energy and water projects. Longuet-Marx was also a visiting fellow at UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2023.

His research interests are centered around Political Economy questions and their intersection with topics in Environmental Economics and Empirical Industrial Organization. 

Longuet-Marx's main research project, supported by the Center for Political Economy, studies the reasons for the increasing educational level of Democratic voters in the US over the recent period. He develops a unified framework for analyzing the interaction of political demand and supply resulting in political outcomes combining fine-grained electoral results with detailed candidate positions. He wrote a research paper studying this question of political realignment in the US from a historical perspective, together with Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu entitled: "Compensate the Losers?” Economic Policy and Partisan Realignment in the U.S." 

Longuet-Marx has been working on other topics in Political Economy and, in particular, published a study of how government performance affects citizens' beliefs about democracy in the Journal of Politics, with Michael Becher and Vincent Pons.

Longuet-Marx is also working on projects studying the impact of labor market outcomes on political behavior, using the dataset built for the project supported by the CPE. Longuet-Marx works, together with Matilde Bombardini, Frederico Finan, Suresh Naidu, and Francesco Trebbi, on voters’ environmental preferences and specifically the role played by green and “dirty” job creation and job destruction to forge ideological stances and voting behavior.

Longuet-Marx also studies, together with Ethan Kaplan, Suresh Naidu, and Aaron Schein, to what extent labor market policies influence agents’ political behavior. Specifically, it examines variations in city-level and county-level minimum wages to determine their influence on voter behavior in terms of registration, turnout, election outcomes, and campaign contributions.

Michael Woodford is the John Bates Clark Professor of  Political Economy at Columbia University. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago, his J.D. from Yale Law School, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been a MacArthur Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a Fellow of the Econometric Society, of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and of the Society for Economic Measurement, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.), a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network (Munich).  He was the 2007 recipient of the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, the 2018 recipient of the Banque de France/TSE Prize in Monetary Economics, and the 2024 recipient of the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.

His most important work is the treatise Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy, recipient of the 2003 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Economics. He is also co-author or co-editor of several other volumes, including a three-volume Handbook of Macroeconomics (with John B. Taylor), a two-volume Handbook of Monetary Economics (with Benjamin M. Friedman), The Inflation Targeting Debate (with Ben S. Bernanke), and the textbook International Macroeconomics (with Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martin Uribe).

His current research focuses on implications of bounded rationality for economic analysis, drawing upon findings in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, with particular emphasis on the consequences of decisions based on imprecise mental representations. He was a founding co-director of the NBER’s working group on Behavioral Macroeconomics. At Columbia, he is Chair of the Department of Economics, and a member of the steering committee of the Program on Cognitive Science.

Michael is the inaugural Work and Labor Idea Lab Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Center for Political Economy. Author of The Occupiers: The Making of the 99% Movement (Oxford 2015) and the forthcoming (Anti)Fascism in America, Michael is a scholar of the far right and the radical left, combining political economy and political ethnography to help us better understand the social bases of social movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Make America Great Again, migrant labor to white power. Michael earned his B.A. in Government from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University.

Melissa joined the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects in July 2024 as a Project Officer. Prior to joining the Center, Melissa worked in philanthropy and international development. Most recently Melissa served as a Program Manager at Philanthropy Together, a global initiative that connects and catalyzes the field of collective giving with the larger aim of fostering a more democratic and diverse philanthropic field. While at Philanthropy Together, she helped strategize and execute events and programs to build, connect, and strengthen collective giving groups such as giving circles and collaborative funds. Previously, Melissa interned with several international development firms, supporting business development teams in securing contracts for government-funded development projects abroad. Melissa holds a B.A. in Global Studies from Long Island University Global College, a four-year experientially based study abroad program. During her undergraduate degree, she completed a blend of coursework, internships, and research throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

Marnie Ginis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Her research spans international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of industrial policy. She is particularly interested in how institutions affect firms’ industrial upgrading decisions. Her dissertation, titled Production Complexity as Extraction Protection: State-Firm Interactions in a Globalized World, explores how rising global production complexity has changed the nature of interactions between states and firms. She argues that states have a “toolbox” of different asset extraction techniques, that firms have a corresponding toolbox of techniques with which to protect themselves, and that rising global production complexity has expanded these toolboxes on both sides. Ginis hypothesizes that firms facing a greater threat of asset extraction will maintain or shift to more complex production processes, and that states take this into account when designing their asset extraction strategies. She uses a variety of methods to test this hypothesis, including firm-level survey experiments, interviews, and case studies in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and China. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research institution in Washington DC. Ginis received her B.A. and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in May 2017 with a double major in Political Science (highest honors) and Economics.

Maria Victoria Murillo (Ph.D., Harvard, 1997) holds a joint appointment with the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs and is currently the Director of the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS).

Murillo is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America, which was translated as Sindicatos, Coaliciones Partidarias y Reformas de Mercado en América Latina by Siglo XXI Editores and Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities. She is also the co-author of Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voters, Poorer Voters, and the Diversification of Electoral Strategies with Ernesto Calvo (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions (Cambridge University Press, Element in Latin American Politics and Society Series, 2019) with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky. She is also the co-editor of Understanding Weak Institutions: Lessons from Latin America ( Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020), Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (Penn State University Press 2005), Carreras Magisteriales, Desempeño Educativo y Sindicatos de Maestros en América Latina (Flacso, 2003), and Discutir Alfonsín (Siglo XXI, 2010). Her work has also appeared in International Organization, World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, the Annual Review of Political Science, and many Latin American academic journals.

Murillo's research on distributive politics in Latin America has covered labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, agricultural policies, and economic policy more generally. Her more recent work focuses on electoral behavior, contentious dynamics, and the analysis of institutional weakness. Her empirical work is based on a variety of methods ranging from quantitative analysis of datasets built for all Latin American countries to qualitative field work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela and survey and experiments in Argentina and Chile.

Murillo received her B.A. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Murillo has taught at Yale University, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Harvard Academy for Area Studies & David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), and at the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as a Fulbright fellow.

Katy Habr is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Sociology Department at Columbia University. She is a fellow at the INCITE Labor Lab and part of the Worker Empowerment Research Network.

Katy focuses on labor and political economy. Her research interests include precarious work, the gig economy, underemployment, labor organizing, and political education. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study changes in the nature of employment and strategies for building worker power. Her dissertation focuses on underemployment and employer cost cutting through insecure scheduling. She is also currently working on a project examining the impact of the gig economy on retail work, as well as projects studying the impact of political education on union members and examining changes in union organizing and employer anti-union tactics. She is the recipient of the  Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements and the  Daniel Bell Award for Publicly-Minded Sociology. 

Katy graduated from Cornell University in 2018 as a Hunter R. Rawlings III Presidential Research Scholar with a B.S. with Honors in Industrial and Labor Relations. Before coming to Columbia University, Katy was a researcher for the United Steelworkers Union in Pittsburgh.

Kathryn joined the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects in April 2023 as a Project Officer. Prior to joining the Center, Kathryn worked for Survivor Corps, a grassroots organization that arose out of the COVID-19 pandemic to connect COVID survivors to medical, scientific, and legal resources and to advocate for long COVID recognition. Kathryn also worked as a COVID-19 Contact Tracer for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at the height of the pandemic, performing outreach to COVID cases and contacts to minimize COVID transmission and help those affected. Now, motivated by her background in pandemic response work, Kathryn is interested in supporting the Center for Political Economy as it reimagines and advances economic frameworks that protect the health and welfare of the public. Kathryn graduated from Vassar College in May 2020 with a degree in Science, Technology & Society.

Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar and writer on corporate governance, money and finance, property rights, and comparative law and legal institutions.

She is the author or co-author of nine books. Her most recent book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collateral law, and trust, corporate, and bankruptcy law. The Code of Capital was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Financial Times and Business Insider. 

Pistor publishes widely in legal and social science journals. In her essay “From Territorial to Monetary Sovereignty” in the Journal on Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2017), she argued that the rise of a global money system means a new definition of sovereignty: the control of money. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Comparative Law, Columbia Journal of European Law, European Business Organization Law Review, and Journal of Institutional Economics. 

Kate Andrias teaches and writes in the fields of constitutional law, labor law, and administrative law. Her scholarship probes the failures of U.S. law to protect workers’ rights, examines the efforts of historical and contemporary worker movements to transform legal structures, and analyzes how labor law and constitutional governance might be reformed to enable greater political and economic democracy. Drawing from constitutional law, administrative law, and legal history perspectives, she also has explored the relationship between law and the perpetuation of economic inequality. She frequently provides advice on policy initiatives to legislators and workers’ rights organizations and works on related litigation. Andrias is a co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab and the Columbia Law School Center for Constitutional Governance.

Prior to law school, Andrias worked for several years as an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. After receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School, she clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 on the U.S. Supreme Court. Andrias practiced political law at Perkins Coie and served as associate counsel and special assistant to President Barack Obama and as chief of staff in the White House Counsel’s Office.

She joined the faculty of Michigan Law School in 2013 and was the recipient of its L. Hart Wright Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016. She joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in 2021 and also has served as an academic fellow at Columbia Law School and taught American Constitutional Law as a visiting professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris. Andrias served as a commissioner and the rapporteur for the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, is a member of the American Law Institute, and sits on the Board of Academic Advisors of the American Constitution Society.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is also the co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, and the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 1979. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and a former chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Known for his pioneering work on asymmetric information, Stiglitz's research focuses on income distribution, climate change, corporate governance, public policy, macroeconomics and globalization. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, People, Power, and Profits, Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy, and Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited.

Jinkyong Choi, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia Business School, is interested in exploring the intersection of entrepreneurship, innovation, and policy in the digital era. Her research aims to shed light on the challenges faced by innovation-driven entrepreneurs in complex policy landscapes, and to identify the best strategies for both entrepreneurs and society to maximize innovation and sustain economic growth.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Seoul National University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago, where she worked at the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. Professionally, she served as deputy director at the Korean Communications Commission, where she participated in the AI ethics charter project. This experience particularly sharpened her focus on managing uncertainty and conflicts in emerging technology field.

In her research, Jinkyong utilizes computational social science methodologies, including natural language processing and big data analysis, to gain deeper insights into these complex interactions.

Jeffry Frieden is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University. He specializes in the politics of international economic relations. Frieden is the author of Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2007; second updated edition 2020); of Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (2015); and the co-author (with Menzie Chinn) of Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery (2012). Frieden is also the author of Debt, Development, and Democracy: Modern Political Economy and Latin America, 1965-1985 (1992), of Banking on the World: The Politics of American International Finance (1987), and the co-author or co-editor of over a dozen other books on related topics. His articles on the politics of international economic issues have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general-interest publications.

Jay Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at Columbia University. His interests include the history of industrial policy, finance, international trade, and the labor movement in Latin America. His research focuses on the historical political economy of Mexico’s industrial policy in the twentieth century, particularly the relationship between businesses, the labor movement and the state.

He is also interested in the history of economic thought in Latin America, particularly the debates surrounding Keynesian economics as well as how the various conceptualizations of underdevelopment informed the strategies of the socialist left. He was previously educated at the London School of Economics (LSE) where he completed his B.A. in History and M.Sc. in Economic History (Research).

Janina S. Santer is a Ph.D. student and Richard Hofstadter Fellow in the History Department at Columbia University, researching the history of the Lebanese state in the 1940s-1950s.

Before moving to New York, she completed a M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. 

Her interests include the social, intellectual, and cultural history of modern Lebanon and her work has been published in Arabic translation in Bidayat °28-29/2020 (Nashʿat al-qiṭāʿ al-siyāḥī wa namūdhaj “lubnān swīsrā al-sharq”).

Ixchel Bosworth is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Her research interests broadly include culture, urban poverty, public education and neighborhood effects. Before joining Columbia, Ixchel worked as a teacher for the New York City Department of Education in the Bronx and Washington Heights. While earning her M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University, she studied the impact of the school disciplinary reform initiative restorative justice on student suspension rates and school culture at three New York City public secondary schools in Brooklyn. She is a recipient of the Columbia Provost Diversity Fellowship and a Reducing Inequality Network Scholar. Currently, her research explores how cultural transmission, political economy, and social inequality inform teachers' approaches and outlooks in schools.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, and Deputy Director, Columbia World Projects. His 2013 Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time was awarded the Bancroft Prize in History and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in Political Science. Other books include Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction (2018, co-authored with David Bateman and John Lapinski), and Liberal Beginnings: A Republic for the Moderns (2008, co-authored with Andreas Kalyvas). His most recent book is Time Counts: Quantitative Methods for Historical Social Science (2022, co-authored with Gregory Wawro).

Professor Katznelson, a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, is a former president both of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science Research Council. He earned his B.A. at Columbia College and his Ph.D. in History at the University of Cambridge, where in 2017-18, he was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions. He also has taught at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. From September 2019 through August 2021 he served as Columbia's Interim Provost. 

Hedwig grew up in Germany, completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees at Leipzig University and studied abroad at UT Austin as an undergraduate and at Princeton as a graduate student. She moved to New York in 2020 for her Ph.D. in political science. Prior to finishing her German degree, she completed internships at an NGO dedicated to anti-discrimination litigation in Berlin, at the Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation, and at the University of Porto, Portugal. She held a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation throughout her Bachelor’s and Master’s and received undergraduate and graduate grants for study abroad in the U.S. from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). To both her joy and her concern, she has now lived longer in the U.S. as an adult than in Europe though can vote only in the latter.

At Columbia, she specializes in political theory, the history of political thought, and legal history and theory. Her particular interests lie in US-American and German political thought in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, critical theory in both its narrow and expansive versions, and in social theories of capitalism. Bringing together an interest in social movements, capitalist social formation, and the law, she aims to contribute to the urgent and ongoing project of rethinking capital-labor relations in an effort to strengthen democracy.

When not teaching or at the library, she enjoys going for long, destination-less walks and to New York’s many theaters.

Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor Emeritus of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is noted for contributions to economic theory and resource and environmental economics. He holds bachelors (first class), masters and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University, where he studied at Churchill College and taught at Christ’s College. He has also taught at Sussex, Essex, Yale, Stanford, École Polytechnique, Stockholm and Princeton. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Universite´ de Paris Dauphine.

Author of eighteen books and about two hundred articles, Professor Heal is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, past Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, Past President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, recipient of its prize for publications of enduring quality and a Life Fellow, recipient of the 2013 Best Publication Prize of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a founder and Director and chairman of the Board of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, developers of the REDD policy for reducing deforestation by awarding carbon credits for forest conservation. Recent books include Nature and the Marketplace, Valuing the Future, When Principles Pay and Whole Earth Economics (forthcoming).

Professor Heal chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences on valuing ecosystem services, was a Commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission, was a coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, was a member of President Sarkozy’s Commission on the Meaurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, was a member of the advisory board for the World Bank’s 2010 World Development Report and the United Nations Environment Program’s 2011 Human Development Report, and acts as an advisor to the World Bank on its Green Growth project. He is also a Director of Public Business, a foundation that promotes in-depth public interest journalism and a member of the Advisory Board of Green Seal.

He has been a principal in two start-up companies, a consulting firm and a software and telecommunications company, and until recently was a member of the Investment Committee of a green private equity group. He teaches MBA courses on “Current Developments in Energy Markets,” “Business and Society: Doing Well by Doing Good?” and “The Business of Sustainability,” teaches a doctoral course on advanced microeconomic theory, and advises doctoral students interested in sustainability.

Evan DiPrete Brown is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. He researches the history of sport, especially as it concerns labor, political economy, and social movements. 

His dissertation follows the movement of people, information, and capital across North America and the Caribbean as professional baseball underwent a social and economic transformation from the 1940s to the 1960s. 

His article “Playing on Grassroots: The Anti-Apartheid Movement, Arthur Ashe, and the Sport Boycott” appeared in the September 2023 issue of American Quarterly.

Emily Mazo is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology. She focuses on labor organizing and collective action, mostly in the tech industry. Before coming to Columbia, she worked as a software engineer.

Ella Coon is a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. Her research considers 20th century U.S. history through the lenses of business history, international political economy, and the history of computing. Before coming to Columbia, Coon received an M.A. in Historical Studies from the New School for Social Research. Her research has been supported by the Charles Babbage Institute (CBI), Hagley Museum and Library, and Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, among others.

David Caughlin is the Project Director of the Center for Political Economy (CPE), where he oversees all activities of the Center, reviews expenditures and reports to donors.  

Previously, David worked at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) where he served as the Associate Director for the MPA in Economic Policy Management (PEPM) and the Center on Global Economy and Governance (CGEG).  In both roles he collaborated with many of Columbia’s global centers, as well as with a variety of schools and offices at Columbia, as well as external partners in the US and internationally. Prior to his work at SIPA, he worked as Program Manager at Columbia’s Law School’s Public Interest Law Initiative, where he oversaw a fellowship program for human rights lawyers from Central and Eastern Europe and Asia.

Before coming to Columbia, David worked as Special Projects Manager at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where, among other duties, he oversaw the development of a publication on Russian constitutional law in Russian.  David holds two master’s degrees – in Human Rights from Central European University, and an MPA at SIPA where he concentrated in International Economic Policy and Management – and is earning a third master’s at Teachers College in Higher and Postsecondary Education.  David was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine and speaks Ukrainian, Russian and some Hungarian. He is an avid jogger and is currently training for his third NYC marathon.

Dafne Murillo is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Columbia University. Her research lies at the intersection of development and political economy. She works on projects related to redistributive policies, discrimination, and state capacity. Previously she worked as a predoctoral research assistant at Columbia Economics for Professors Michael Best, Jonas Hjort and Eric Verhoogen. She holds a Master of Arts in Economics and Bachelor in Economics and Latin American Studies from Columbia University.

Ben is a doctoral candidate in the Communications Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His research interests include the history of energy, environmental history, political economy, and the history of technology. Before pursuing his Ph.D., Ben worked as a software engineer for the Washington Post and as a data analyst for The New School. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Philosophy, and from the New School for Social Research with an M.A. in Liberal Studies. His dissertation is a fresh history of the U.S. electricity mix from its origins to the present.

Anusha Sundar is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Columbia University. Her research interests include histories of labor, histories of health, science and medicine, and histories of South Asia. Her doctoral project, tentatively titled, Migrant Work, Health, and the Discourse of Free Labor in British India, examines the making of the “coolie body,” and the addresses the emergence of migrant labour as the site of debates over colonial medical governance, evidence-making, and the politics of welfare. The project traces a longue durée history of crisis and exposure in the life course of migrant ‘coolie’ labor in South India between 1840s and 1930s and examines how the logic of labor protectionism projected health as an indicator of risk and social recognition, while reinscribing immobility, and forging new links between deficiency, vitality, and labor power.

Prior to joining Columbia University, Anusha graduated from Jawaharlal Nehru University with a MPhil., and M.A. in History. She received her B.A. in History from the University of Delhi. At Columbia University, she is a co-convener of the Labor History Working Group. In February 2024, the group organized a conference, Labor Past and Present: Bringing History and Activism Together that brought together labor historians and labor organizers to reflect on historical and contemporary developments in the field. She has also served as the graduate student coordinator of the Histories of Health, Science and Environment in the Global South seminar series. 

Anika Lanser is a Ph.D. Student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Sociology Department at Columbia University. Her research interests include education and special education, social movements, labor, and organizations. She is generally interested in how teachers and administrators navigate their institutional roles, especially in their capacity as disciplinarians, and how teachers effectively push for change within their schools and districts. Another line of her research is interested in using participatory mapping to illustrate how students’ identities structure their spatial experiences of their schools. Before Columbia, Anika received her Bachelor’s in Sociology with a minor in History from Vassar College. After college, Anika taught fifth and sixth grade special education while pursuing her Master’s in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education. She then completed a Master’s in Sociology at Columbia University before working as a Research Assistant at the Center for Social Development and Education.

Angela Ryu is a Ph.D. candidate in Management at Columbia Business School, whose seeks to understand how firms navigate the intricate sociopolitical and regulatory environment, especially in the digital age. Her research aims to uncover intriguing phenomena with strategic and policy implications by harnessing large text and image data and field experiments.

Her recent work investigates interfirm competition in state-level policymaking, with a specific focus on negative lobbying to dampen the impact of competitor support for policy initiatives. Additionally, she investigates fake news publishers on social media platforms, online and offline sociopolitical discourse, and demographic-blind hiring.

Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., she received a master's degree in Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences (QMSS) from Columbia University and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan with a degree in Economics, where she graduated with distinction.

Andrea Prat is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Columbia University. After receiving his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1997, he taught at Tilburg University and the London School of Economics. He joined Columbia in 2012.

Professor Prat's work focuses on organizational economics and political economy. His current research in organizational economics explores - through theoretical modeling, field experiments, and data analysis - issues such as incentive provision, corporate leadership, employee motivation, and organizational language. Professor Prat is a principal investigator of the Executive Time Use Project. His current research in political economy attempts to define and measure the influence of the media industry on the democratic process.

He is the author of numerous articles in leading journals in economics and finance including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Finance, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. He served as Chairman and Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He is an Associate Editor of Theoretical Economics and a director of the Industrial Organization program of the Center for Economic Policy Research in London. Professor Prat was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2013.

Alessandra Casella is professor of Economics and professor of Political Science at Columbia University, co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Ma), and the Center for Economic Policy Research (London, UK). She is a graduate of Universita’ Bocconi and received her PhD in Economics from MIT. She has taught at UC Berkeley and held a position as Directeur d’ Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (Paris and Marseilles).

She founded the Columbia Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences, which she directed from 2012 to 2022. Casella is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, has been a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, a Russell Sage fellow and a Straus fellow at the NYU Law School. Since 2016, she is on the board of editors of the American Economic Review.

Casella is a graduate of Universita’ Bocconi and received her PhD in Economics from MIT. She has taught at UC Berkeley and held a position as Directeur d’ Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (Paris and Marseilles).