Johns Hopkins University
School of Government and Policy

Peter Arcidiacono is a labor economist best known for his work in three areas: college major choice, affirmative action in higher education, and structural estimation of dynamic discrete choice models. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the International Association of Applied Econometricians. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court cases SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC, examining the role race played in the admissions process at both institutions. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999.

Levon Barseghyan is an economist whose research spans multiple fields and integrates diverse approaches within economics. Barseghyan’s work, both theoretical and empirical, is aimed at uncovering mechanisms that shape economic behavior and how such behavior is affected by market structure, economic policies and political institutions.

Barseghyan has done pioneering work to develop methods to study the nature of risk preferences and their contextual stability, combining insights from behavioral economics and theory with state-of-the-art econometric techniques. His work offers innovative ways to conduct inference that are valid in a variety of settings beyond risk. The importance of this research agenda has been evidenced by publications in top economic journals and National Science Foundation awards.

Barseghyan has worked on the effects of institutions and policies on economic outcomes, particularly at the intersection of growth, public finance, and political economy. This research employs carefully constructed theoretical models to shed light on the consequences of institutions or specific policies on economic and societal outcomes. Examples include slowdowns caused by lax banking regulations, theoretical and empirical analysis of barriers to entry, the link between public debt and growth, and more recently, the role of local public finances in shaping community development.

Barseghyan is the Robert Julius Thorne Professor of Economics at Cornell University, where he has served since 2003 after completing his Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He holds multiple advanced degrees including a diploma in mathematics from Yerevan State University, an M.S. in industrial engineering from the American University of Armenia, and an M.S. in policy economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Nathaniel Baum-Snow is an urban economist with a wide range of urban policy research interests, including in housing and real estate, transportation, the operation of urban labor markets, and local economic development. His current active research includes studies about the consequences for affordability of expanding housing supply, characterization of wage and productivity differences across locations within cities and impacts of neighborhood environments on children’s long-run outcomes. 

Baum-Snow’s published research makes significant contributions to understanding how transportation infrastructure generates changes in urban form, and associated welfare consequences, in both the U.S. and Chinese contexts. His recent high-impact publications include work on local productivity spillovers, the microgeography of housing supply, and a comprehensive review of the literature about housing supply and affordability in the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. His research portfolio also includes influential studies on school desegregation and residential location patterns, the effects of low-income housing tax credit developments on neighborhoods, the causes and consequences of urban gentrification, and the impact of urban rail transit expansions across sixteen cities in the U.S. Another stream of published research examines the reasons for which workers earn more and have more dispersed wages in larger cities.

Baum-Snow received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 2005 and served as a faculty member in the Economics Department at Brown University from 2005 to 2015 before joining the University of Toronto. He is a managing editor at the Journal of Urban Economics.

Stefanie DeLuca studies how experiences in social settings like neighborhoods and schools shape the outcomes of disadvantaged families and young people, and how policy interventions can increase their opportunities. Her current projects focus on a major housing policy experiment and a major financial aid experiment, the school-to-work trajectories of community college students, and the role of communities in explaining changes in economic mobility in the U.S. by race and class. While her research brings a sociological perspective to the evaluation of education and housing policy, many of her studies also involve interdisciplinary collaborations. She deploys rigorous research designs that combine experimental, non-experimental, and qualitative data to evaluate the effectiveness of social policies and understand the mechanisms that underlie causal effects.

DeLuca conducts mixed-methods studies that incorporate qualitative research into experimental or quasi-experimental designs. Some of her work focuses on the long-term effects of programs to help low-income families relocate to safer neighborhoods and better schools through housing vouchers. Based on some of this work with young adults in the Baltimore site of the Moving to Opportunity program, Stefanie wrote the book Coming of Age in the Other America (with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title from the American Library Association, and won the William F. Goode Award from the American Sociological Association.

DeLuca’s research has been made possible by generous support from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Spencer Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Abell Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, National Academy of Education, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Department of Education, among others.

DeLuca contributes frequently to national and local media, including The Atlantic, The Baltimore Sun, The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. She has been invited to share her research to support policy recommendations at the federal level at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services, and has provided briefings and testimony for several state legislatures and in federal court on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Baltimore Thompson v. HUD housing desegregation case. She currently serves on a Federal Research Advisory Commission at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Her other awards and honors include the Publicly Engaged Scholar Award from the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, Scholar of the Year by the National Alliance of Resident Services in Assisted and Affordable Housing, William T. Grant Faculty Scholars Award, Johns Hopkins University Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award, and election to the Sociological Research Association.

Poverty and Inequality Research Lab: https://otheramerica.org/

Gillian Hadfield’s research focuses on innovative design for legal, regulatory, and technical systems for AI, computational models of human normative systems, and building AI systems that understand and respond to human values and norms.

Hadfield believes normativity—the practice of classifying behaviors as acceptable or unacceptable and then coordinating third-party enforcement schemes to channel behaviors away from those classified as unacceptable—is at the root of everything that distinguishes us from our primate ancestors. Human normative systems—such as social norms, informal dispute resolution, and formal systems of law—are the fundamental infrastructure of human groups. 

Hadfield is currently working on the challenge of AI governance and alignment problems and computational models to analyze the phenomenon and characteristics of normativity and legal order. For AI to be beneficial to society, it will have to integrate into our normative systems; at a minimum, it must not break these complex, dynamic processes—the systems that underpin our willingness to engage in the phenomenal levels of interdependence and cooperation that characterize modern human societies. This involves determining how to build AI systems that advance human normative efforts, enabling us to find and live by better rules; achieve fairer, more just, and more peaceful societies; and support human flourishing. Her approach is grounded in a career focused on understanding human norms and institutions that promote human well-being.

In addition to her roles at Johns Hopkins University, Hadfield is a a faculty member of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and professor of law (status-only) at the University of Toronto. She is also a faculty affiliate at both the University of California, Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and the University of Toronto Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, where she previously served as its inaugural director and held the Schwartz Reisman Chair in Technology and Society.

Among Hadfield’s awards and honors are the 2024 Carolyn Tuohy Impact on Public Policy Award and President’s Impact Award from the University of Toronto; the 2019 Mundell Medal for Excellence in Legal Writing for her book, Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy; and a 2018 Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award. She was additionally named to Maclean’s 2024 The Power List: AI, named a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 senior fellow in 2023, awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Residency in 2022, and was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford from 2006 to 2007 and again from 2010 to 2011. Hadfield has published in leading journals, including Science, Science Advances, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, and the Annual Review of Political Science, as well as in the Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI Ethics and Society.

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Hadfield was a professor of law and strategic management at the University of Toronto. She earned her bachelor’s from Queen’s University and her J.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Personal website: https://gillianhadfield.org/

Angela Hawken is dedicated to interdisciplinary, practitioner-centered partnerships with state and local agencies and nonprofits to implement and test policies, practices, and new technologies. Working with agencies in over 40 states and 6 countries, her team provides technical assistance on existing and novel implementations and empowers “pracademics” by ensuring that practitioners play a central role in research, and that the software and other technology her team creates centers on their needs. 

At NYU, Hawken directed the interdisciplinary Litmus program, and she is the founding director of BetaGov, a resource center for practitioner-led pragmatic field experiments that provides tools to develop and conduct tests of practices and policies to increase the pace of innovation in criminal justice and other policy areas. While at NYU, she also directed two centers for the US Department of Justice and led the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which partnered with justice agencies in ten states on designing, implementing, and testing responses to the opioid crisis. 

Prior to joining the School of Government and Policy, Hawken was professor of public policy at New York University and director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, a research economist at UCLA, and an associate policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. She holds a B.S. and an honors degree in economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School.

William Howell is inaugural Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Political Science. William has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on separation of powers issues, the institutional foundations of effective government, and emergent threats to democracy.

William’s most recent book (with Terry Moe) is Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency (Princeton University Press, 2025). He also is the author or co-author of numerous other books, including: Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Relic: How the Constitution Undermines Effective Government–And Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (Basic Books, 2016); The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton University Press, 2013); While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton University Press, 2007); Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton University Press, 2003); The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings Institution Press, 2002); and textbooks on the American presidency and American politics. His research also has appeared in numerous professional journals and edited volumes.

William is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is the recipient, among other academic awards, of the Legacy Award for enduring research on executive politics, the William H. Riker Prize in Political Science for the best book in political economy, the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress, the Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize for the best book on the American presidency, and the E.E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in American politics. His work has been supported by such foundations as the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation. He has written for a wide variety of media outlets, including The Boston Review, Prospect Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and Education Next.

Before coming to Johns Hopkins, William was a faculty member in the Harris School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, the government department at Harvard University, and the political science department at the University of Wisconsin. In 2000, he received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

Seth Lazar is a leading voice in the moral and political philosophy of artificial intelligence, bridging traditional philosophical ethics with contemporary technological challenges. His research spans multiple domains and disciplines, ranging from his foundational work in the ethics of war and risk to his current work at the frontiers of philosophy, public policy, and the AI transition.  

Lazar’s research group, the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab, works on AI safety, governance, and resilience. Projects range from evaluating and enhancing LLM moral reasoning, to practical proposals for governing AI agents, to rethinking fundamental moral and political theories and institutions for the age of powerful AI. His book Connected by Code: Algorithmic Intermediaries and Political Philosophy, based on his 2023 Tanner Lecture on AI and Human Values at Stanford University, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2026. 

Prior to joining Johns Hopkins University, Lazar was professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. He holds a D.Phil., M.Phil., and B.A. (Hons) from the University of Oxford. Lazar is a visiting faculty researcher at Google DeepMind, a nonresident scholar of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a distinguished research fellow at the University of Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI. His research is supported by organizations including the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, AI2050, Google, OpenAI and the Australian Research Council.

Francesca Molinari is a leading authority in econometric theory and applied econometrics. Her theoretical research focuses primarily on the study of identification problems, analyzing the limits of what can be learned from available data about causal relationships in economics and in the social sciences. She develops new methods for statistical inference in partially identified models, while her applied work centers on analyzing decision-making under risk and uncertainty, including estimation of risk preferences using market-level data and analysis of individuals’ probabilistic expectations using survey data.

Professor Molinari’s scholarly contributions have fundamentally shaped the field of partial identification in econometrics, particularly through her innovative use of random set theory as a unifying mathematical framework. Her research addresses the core challenge that available data combined with credible assumptions can yield substantial information about parameters of interest even when they cannot be identified exactly. This work has provided economists with tractable methods to characterize, estimate, and conduct hypothesis tests in situations where traditional point identification is impossible.

In her applied research, Molinari has made significant contributions to understanding risk preferences and decision-making behavior, particularly through her extensive collaboration with Levon Barseghyan, Ted O’Donoghue, and Joshua Teitelbaum on insurance choice and discrete choice under risk. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Aging, reflecting the broad impact and policy relevance of her work. Through her comprehensive handbook chapter Microeconometrics with Partial Identification, she has also provided the field with an authoritative review of three decades of developments in this crucial area of econometric methodology.

Molinari is an editor of the Journal of Political Economy and former joint managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies. She is a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the International Association for Applied Econometrics. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University after obtaining her B.A. and master’s in economics from the Università degli Studi di Torino in Italy.

Bhaven N. Sampat is an economist focusing on the economics, law, history, and political economy of science and technology. Among other topics, he has studied U.S. and global patent policy, the politics and economics of publicly funded science, the roles of the government in pharmaceutical innovation, and the economic history of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise. An overarching theme in his research is how science and technology policies can best be designed to contribute to improvements in health and other socio-economic outcomes.

Sampat’s current research is focused on three main projects: (1) Assessing the long-run effects of the World War II research effort on U.S. science, innovation, and science and technology policy; (2) Research on pharmaceutical patent policy, innovation, competition, and access to medicines in the U.S. and globally; (3) Historical and quantitative research on the economics and political economy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest single funder of biomedical research in the world. He also works on creating and validating new measures linking publicly-funded research investments to private sector patents, drugs, and other socio-economic outcomes, a topic of long-running interest throughout his career. A broader interest is in providing historical context and evidence to bear on current debates surrounding the advancement and governance of emerging technologies.

Sampat received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (all in economics) from Columbia University, and did a post-doctoral fellowship through the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJF) Foundation’s Scholars in Health Policy Research program at the University of Michigan. Most recently, he was a professor in Arizona State University’s (ASU’s) School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Public Affairs. Before joining ASU in 2023, he was assistant, associate, and full professor at the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He has held visiting positions at NYU Law School and NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, among other institutions. 

He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program, a  founding member of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Innovation Information Initiative (I3), a data collaborative for open innovation data and related analytics, tools, and metrics; a member of the editorial advisory board of the Milbank Quarterly, a leading health policy journal; a fellow of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU’s School of Law, and an affiliated professor in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) Science for Progress Initiative.

Sampat’s research has been funded through the RWJF Investigator Award in Health Policy Research, the RWJF Public Health Law Research Program, the Commonwealth Fund, the Ford Foundation, and National Science Foundation, among other sources. He has published in top journals across several fields, including Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, Management Science, the Review of Economic Studies, and the American Economic Review.

Steven Teles is a political scientist focused on the intersection of political economy, public policy, political parties and ideology.  His recent writings focus on minoritarianism and its impact on democracy, the abundance movement, political economy, and the need for greater ideological diversity in higher education.  

Teles is the author of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites (Oxford University Press, 2020); The Captured Economy: How The Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality (with Brink Lindsey, Oxford University Press, 2017); Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration (with David Dagan, Oxford University Press, 2016); The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas, 1996). He is also editor of Conservatism and American Political Development (with Brian Glenn, Oxford University Press, 2009) and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and UK (with Glenn Loury and Tariq Modood, Cambridge University Press, 2005). He has published widely in more popular outlets, from Democracy Journal, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The American Prospect, to National Affairs, The Public Interest, and National Review.  

Teles earned his Ph.D. in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia in 1995 and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University’s Center for American Political Studies and Princeton University. He earned his B.A. in political science from George Washington University in 1989.