Deborah Balk
Deborah Balk is Professor of Public Affairs in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and Director of the CUNY Institute of Demographic Research (CIDR). She was a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. She is an expert on population-climate interactions.
Using a spatial demographic lens, she studies a wide range of demographic and health outcomes, poverty and vulnerability. She is a pioneer in the spatial modeling of urbanization, and was the lead developer of the Global Rural Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP) and co-developer of the first global Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) data sets, which allowed for the estimation of urban population at risk of climate-change hazards.
She currently serves as Co-Chair of the New York City Panel on Climate Change’s 4th Assessment, was a member of Society and Economy Working Group of the just-released New York State Climate Impacts Assessment, is a member of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee and of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population. She received her Ph.D. in Demography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
Jacob Faber
Jacob William Faber is an associate professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and holds a joint appointment in NYU’s Sociology Department. His research and teaching focuses on spatial inequality. He leverages observational and experimental methods to study the mechanisms responsible for sorting individuals across space and how the distribution of people by race and class interacts with political, social, and ecological systems to create and sustain economic disparities. While there is a rich literature exploring the geography of opportunity, there remain many unsettled questions about the causes of segregation and its effects on the residents of urban ghettos, wealthy suburbs, and the diverse set of places in between.
Nancy Folbre
Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the editor of For Love and Money: Care Work in the U.S. (Russell Sage, 2012), and the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard University Press, 2008), and The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001). Her latest book is The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems. She has also written widely for a popular audience, including contributions to The New York Times Economix blog, The Nation, and The American Prospect. Her current writing on the political economy of care provision can be seen on her blog, Care Talk.
Martin Gilens
Martin Gilens is chair of the Department of Public Policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. He also is a professor of Public Policy, Political Science, and Social Welfare at UCLA. His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, and Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy, and coauthor (with Benjamin I. Page) of Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It. He has published widely on political inequality, mass media, race, gender, and welfare politics. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Gilens is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and taught at Yale and Princeton universities before joining the Luskin School in 2018.
Janet Gornick
Janet Gornick is the director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Distinguished Chair in Socio-Economic Inequality, and a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center. She attended Harvard University, where she was awarded a B.A. in psychology and social relations, an M.P.A. (Kennedy School), and a Ph.D. in political economy and government. From 2006 to 2016, she served as director of LIS (formerly, the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross‐national data archive and research center located in Luxembourg, with a satellite office at the Graduate Center. Most of her research is comparative and concerns social welfare policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and income inequality. She has published articles on gender inequality, employment, and social policy in many journals, and is co-author or co-editor of four books: Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (Russell Sage Foundation), Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (Verso Press), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (Stanford University Press), and Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth (University of Chicago Press).
Michelle Holder
Michelle Holder is an Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College, City University of New York, and was an Urban Institute One Million Black Women Research Partnership Scholar in 2023. She was also Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in Washington, D.C. through February 2023, and led the organization as its president and CEO 2021-2022. Michelle has worked as an applied economist for over a decade in the nonprofit and government sectors, and her research focuses on Black workers and women of color in the American labor market. Her economic policy reports have been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Amsterdam News, El Diario, and Dollars & Sense. Michelle has also appeared on, or been quoted in, major media outlets including CNN, CBS, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, PBS, The Washington Post, The Lily, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, TheGrio, Politico, Al Jazeera-English, The Guardian, USA Today, The 19th, Word in Black, Marketplace, Bloomberg, and Vox, and she’s testified before Congress as well as the City Council of New York on issues such as infrastructure investment, the gender wage gap, prohibiting discrimination based on unemployment status, and Black men and employment. Her first book, African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession, was published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan, and her second book, Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Economy, co-authored with Alan Aja, was published in 2021 by Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. Michelle received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from The New School for Social Research, a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Fordham University.
Jaquelyn Jahn
Jaquelyn (Jackie) Jahn, Ph.D., MPH, is an assistant professor in Drexel University’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics and The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity. She is a social epidemiologist whose research investigates how structural racism shapes maternal and child health and population health equity. Much of her work focuses on the health of individuals, families, and communities that are affected by the U.S. criminal legal system. She applies a multilevel, intersectional lens to evaluate the health consequences of policing and incarceration, as well as the role of policies and social movements advancing community health, safety, and wellbeing. Before joining Drexel, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stone Center. She received her Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she also received her MPH.
Michael Kraus
Michael Kraus is a social psychologist who specializes in the study of inequality. His current work explores the behaviors and emotional states that maintain and perpetuate economic and social inequality in society. He also studies the emotional processes that allow individuals and teams to work together more effectively. He is currently at Yale University. In July 2024, he will join Northwestern University as a professor of Psychology and the Institute for Policy Research as a Morton O. Schapiro Faculty Fellow. Kraus was trained at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his B.A. in psychology and sociology and his Ph.D. in social psychology. Before starting at Yale, he was a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Francisco and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois.
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center, a core faculty member at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, a LIS senior scholar, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. He previously taught at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton. He is the author or co-author of many academic papers and numerous books aimed at both professional and general audiences, including Market Structure and Foreign Trade, Geography and Trade, and The Return of Depression Economics. In recognition of his work on international trade and economic geography, Krugman received the John Bates Clark award of the American Economic Association in 1991, the Prince of Asturias award for social sciences in 2004, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008.
Tina Law
Tina Law is a sociologist who studies race and ethnicity, inequality, and social change in U.S. cities. Her research is centered on understanding the social and political experiences of racially minoritized residents in cities, and she uses computational, quantitative, and historical methods to examine how they are impacted by urban transformations and their strategies for fostering political empowerment and self-determination. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University in 2022 and will be joining the University of California, Davis, as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in July 2024.
Leslie McCall
Leslie McCall is presidential professor of sociology and political science, and associate director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, at the Graduate Center. She studies public opinion about inequality, opportunity, and related economic and policy issues; trends in actual earnings and family income inequality; and patterns of intersectional inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001). Her research has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University, and the Advanced Research Collaborative of the Graduate Center. She was formerly a professor of Sociology and Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
Bhash Mazumder
Bhashkar “Bhash” Mazumder is a senior economist and research advisor in the economic research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. As a member of the microeconomic team, Mazumder conducts research in labor economics, education, and health. His research has been focused in three areas: intergenerational economic mobility, the long-term effects of poor health early in life, and black-white gaps in human capital development. Mazumder’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Quantitative Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He previously worked at the Conference Board in New York and oversaw the transfer of the leading economic indicators from the U.S. Commerce Department to the Conference Board. He received a B.A. in political science from New York University, an M.A. in economics from New York University, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Lauren Melodia
Lauren Melodia is the deputy director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. Prior to joining the Center, she worked at the Roosevelt Institute, analyzing the Covid-19 economic recovery, inflation, and fiscal and monetary policy at the national level. At CNYCA, Melodia’s research focuses on the labor market experiences of NYC’s low-income workers and workers of color. Melodia conducts extensive research on the child care workforce. Her 2023 paper on home-based child care providers offers a foundational estimate of the take-home pay of these small business owners. Melodia holds a B.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University and an M.A. in economics from John Jay College. She is a doctoral student in economics at the New School for Social Research.
Branko Milanovic
Branko Milanovic is a research professor at the Graduate Center and a senior scholar at the Stone Center for Socio-Economic Inequality. His main area of work is income inequality, in individual countries and globally, including in pre-industrial societies. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Belgrade with a dissertation on income inequality in Yugoslavia. He served as lead economist in the World Bank’s Research Department for almost 20 years, leaving to write Worlds Apart (2005). His other books include The Haves and the Have-nots; Global Inequality; Capitalism, Alone; and Visions of Inequality. Milanovic was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington (2003–2005) and has held teaching appointments at the University of Maryland (2007–2013) and at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University (1997–2007). In 2018, he was awarded (jointly with Mariana Mazzucato) the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Knowledge.
Salvatore Morelli
Salvatore Morelli is the director of The GC Wealth Project and a senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. He is currently an associate professor in public economics in the Law Department at the Roma Tre University. He holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford and and M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE). He is also a research associate at the Center for Studies of Economics and Finance (CSEF) at the University of Naples Federico II. Salvatore’s research interests center around the measurement, determinants, and consequences of income and wealth inequality as well as the economics of income and wealth taxation. A number of his recent research projects focus on the role of intergenerational wealth transfers and its taxation in shaping wealth distribution, and around several methodological issues for the estimation of personal wealth concentration (mostly using inheritance tax data and survey data). More recently, his ongoing research is also focused on understanding the interconnection between economic inequality and CO2 emissions.
Suresh Naidu
Suresh Naidu is a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Columbia University. He has a B.Math in pure mathematics from the University of Waterloo, a M.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008 to 2010, and has been at Columbia since 2010. Naidu works on political economy, economic history, development economics, and labor economics. He has also worked on monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, historical unions and labor organizing, and the effects of democratic and non-democratic transitions, among other topics.
James Parrott
James A. Parrott is the director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. Parrott’s recent research projects include analyses of the economic impact of the Covid-19 crisis in New York City, and of the magnitude of gig and other low-paid independent contract work in New York State. Parrott co-authored, along with Michael Reich of the University of California, Berkeley, the analysis that led to New York City’s first-in-the-nation minimum pay standard for app-dispatched drivers. In 2020, Parrott and Reich released a similar study commissioned the City of Seattle. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and in previous positions has worked for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the City of New York’s economic development strategy office, the Office of the State Comptroller for New York City, and the Fiscal Policy Institute. He has taught at Hunter College, The New School, and CUNY’s Murphy Institute.
Núria Rodríguez-Planas
Núria Rodríguez-Planas is a professor of Economics at Queens College, CUNY, and a member of the doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center. Her research is mostly distributed across three broad highly policy-relevant topics: policies, institutions, and social justice in labor economics and human capital development; social norms and behavioral decisions; and public health issues. In 2023, she received a five-year ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council to lead the project “The Causal Effect of Motherhood, Gender Norms, and Cash Transfers to Women on Intimate Partner Violence (WomEmpower).” In 2024, she was named a Distinguished Researcher at the Universitat de Barcelona. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Economics of the Household and was the managing editor of the IZA Journal of Labor Policy from 2012 to 2023. Among other publications, she is the author of “Longer-Term Impacts of Mentoring, Educational Services, and Learning Incentives: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in the United States,” which analyzes an intensive and comprehensive randomly designed program aimed at low-performing students from low-performing U.S. high schools.
Daniela Adriana Tagtachian
Daniela Adriana Tagtachian is a doctoral student in sociology at the Graduate Center, a poverty lawyer, and the managing editor of
Van Tran
Van Tran is an Associate Professor of Sociology and International Migration Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. He is an expert on race, ethnicity, migration, and urban inequality. His research and teaching focus on four themes: mobility and integration of the immigrant second generation, intergroup relations and racial attitudes, Asian American diversity and growth, and neighborhood integration and urban change. His current research examines intra-Asian diversity with a primary focus on vulnerable Asian groups, mental health among Asian elders, concentrated incarceration and the reentry process, and the integration of second-generation Africans. Tran is the faculty co-director for the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Collaboration Hub, a multidisciplinary initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation to transform ethnic studies across CUNY. He received his B.A. in Sociology from Hunter College and Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard.
Hannah Walker
Hannah Walker is an Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines the impact of the criminal justice system on American democracy with special attention to minority and immigrant communities. Her book, Mobilized by Injustice, explores the impact of experiences with the criminal justice system on political engagement, with particular interest in the conditions under which people decide to contest punitive policies in the United States. Current research builds on the book to take an in-depth look at the intersections of immigration and criminal justice, and the means by which Latinx communities are specifically targeted by these policies. A series of field experiments evaluates best strategies for mobilizing people with felony convictions to register and vote. A final suite of projects examines the politics of policing and possibilities for harm-reductive reforms. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and her B.A. from Washington State University.