Appendix D
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members
MARIANNE P. BITLER (Chair) is a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Bitler’s expertise lies in public economics, labor economics, health economics, and applied microeconomics, with particular emphasis on the effects of government safety net programs on disadvantaged groups. Prior to arriving at UC Davis, she was a professor of economics at UC Irvine. She has worked at the Public Policy Institute of California, the RAND Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Bitler is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. She has served on the National Academies’ Health and Medicine Division Panel to Review the WIC Food Package and on the just completed Committee on National Statistics Panel to Review and Evaluate the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation’s Content and Design. Dr. Bitler holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
TIM BEATTY is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining UC Davis, he was a faculty member in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, and he has held visiting positions with the University of British Columbia, Statistics Norway, and the University of Bologna. His research relates to the empirical analysis of consumption behavior, in particular as it relates to health outcomes at both the household and aggregate levels. He has served as a co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He is a long-time member of the Agricultural
and Applied Economics Association, serving in leadership roles in the Food Safety and Nutrition and Econometrics sections. He holds an M.Sc. in applied economics from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal and a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
F. JAY BREIDT is a professor in the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University, where he served from 2005 to 2010 as department chair. Dr. Breidt joined the Colorado State faculty in 2002 after nearly 10 years in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. His research interests include estimation for complex surveys, survey sampling, time series, and environmental monitoring. He is an associate editor of the Electronic Journal of Statistics and the Journal of Forecasting. He has previously served on several National Academies committees, including the Panel on Using ACS to Estimate Children in Poverty for School Breakfast and Lunch Programs and the Panel on the Census Bureau’s Reengineered Survey of Income and Program Participation. Dr. Breidt is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He holds an M.S. and a Ph.D., both in statistics, from Colorado State University.
CRAIG GUNDERSEN is Soybean Industry Endowed Professor of Agricultural Strategy in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. Prior to joining the University of Illinois, he served as an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service as well as academic positions at Iowa State University. His research attempts to inform policy makers and program administrators who are seeking paths to reduce food insecurity and its consequences, with emphasis on food assistance programs, particularly the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Dr. Gundersen serves as an editor for the Journal of Nutrition and the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside.
MICHAEL W. LINK is division vice president for Data Science, Surveys and Enabling Technologies at Abt Associates. Prior to joining Abt, he was chief methodologist for research methods at The Nielsen Company. He has a broad base of experience in survey research, having worked in academia (University of South Carolina), not-for-profit research (RTI International), government (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and the private sector (Nielsen). His research concerns some of the most pressing issues facing survey research, including techniques for improving survey participation and data quality, methodological issues involving use of multiple modes in data collection, and obtaining participation from hard-to-survey populations.
His research articles have appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly and other leading scientific journals. In 2011, he and several research colleagues received AAPOR’s Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award for their work on address-based sampling designs. His current research focuses on emerging technologies, such as mobile and social platforms, as vehicles for measuring and understanding public attitudes and behaviors. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of South Carolina.
BRUCE D. MEYER is the McCormick Foundation professor of public policy in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment he was a professor in the Economics Department at Northwestern University, where he taught for 17 years. His current research includes studies of poverty and inequality, government safety net programs, welfare policy, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, disability, the health care safety net, labor supply, and the accuracy of household surveys. Previously, he was a visiting faculty member at Harvard University, University College London, and Princeton University. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Conference on Research on Income and Wealth. Dr. Meyer has served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, Human Resources Development Canada, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, and Mathematica Policy Research. He holds an M.A. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in economics.
AMY B. O’HARA is a research professor in the Massive Data Institute and executive director of the Federal Statistical Research Data Center at the McCourt School for Public Policy at Georgetown University. She was previously a senior research scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (2017–2018). From 2014 until her move to Stanford, she was chief of the Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications (CARRA), which was then part of the research and methodology directorate at the U.S. Census Bureau. She began her career at the Census Bureau in 2004 as an economist/statistician in the Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division before shifting to CARRA in 2008. Among other accomplishments in attempting to integrate administrative records data into the full suite of Census Bureau processes, she led the 2010 Census Match Study—an unprecedented complete match/linkage of the full set of returns from the 2010 decennial census to a composite of administrative records data from eight federal agencies. She received an Arthur S. Flemming Award for outstanding achievement and leadership in federal government service,
from the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University, in 2012. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics, both from the University of Notre Dame.
ERIC B. RIMM is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition and director of the Program in Cardiovascular Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School. His research group has specific interests both in the study of modifiable lifestyle choices (e.g., diet and physical activity) in relation to cardiovascular disease as well as the translation of these findings into public health interventions that are effective for schoolchildren, adults, and the food-insecure. He has previously served on the scientific advisory committee for the 2010 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. He has published more than 450 peer-reviewed publications during his 20-plus years on the faculty at Harvard. Dr. Rimm is an associate editor for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and the American Journal of Epidemiology. He also was awarded the 2012 American Society for Nutrition General Mills Institute of Health and Nutrition Innovation Award. He holds an Sc.D. in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
NORA CATE SCHAEFFER is Sewell Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also serves as faculty director of the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, teaches courses in survey research methods, and conducts research on questionnaire design and interaction during survey interviews. She currently serves as a member of the Public Opinion Quarterly Advisory Board of the American Association for Public Opinion Research and as a member of the General Social Survey Board of Overseers. She recently completed terms as the Council on Sections Representatives for the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association and as a member of the Census Advisory Committee of Professional Associations. She is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association. She has served on multiple National Academies committees, including seven consensus studies, and is a former member of the Committee on National Statistics. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
DIANE W. SCHANZENBACH is director of the Institute for Policy Research, the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy, and faculty fellow at Northwestern University. She is also currently research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. She studies policies
aimed at improving the lives of children in poverty, including education, health, and income support policies. Her recent work has focused on tracing the impact of major public policies such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and early childhood education on children’s long-term outcomes. She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, both in economics.
SOFIA BERTO VILLAS-BOAS is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include industrial organization, consumer behavior, food policy, and environmental regulation. Her recent empirical work estimates the effects of policies on consumer behavior, such as a bottled water tax, a plastic bag ban, and a soda tax campaign and its implementation. Other published work has focused on the economics behind legislation banning wholesale price discrimination, contractual relationships along a vertical supply chain, including the role of those contracts in explaining pass-through of cost shocks along the supply chain into the retail prices that consumers face. She has been widely published in top economics and field journals, including the Review of Economic Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Marketing Science. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in economics.
PARKE E. WILDE is professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. His research focus is on U.S. food and nutrition policy, consumer economics, and federal food assistance programs. His current and past research has addressed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s Healthy Incentive Pilot; the geography of local food retail; federal commodity checkoff programs; and food and beverage marketing to children. He has also authored a textbook on food policy in the United States. Dr. Wilde was a member of the National Academies’ Food Forum from 2011 to 2014 and served on the planning committee for a National Academies workshop on Sustainable Diets: Food for Healthy People and a Healthy Planet (2013). He holds a B.A. in political science from Swarthmore College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in agricultural economics from Cornell University.
JAMES P. ZILIAK is Carol Martin Gatton Endowed Chair in Microeconomics in the Department of Economics at the University of Kentucky and founding director of the Center for Poverty Research. His research expertise is in the areas of tax and welfare policy, poverty, and food insecurity. He is the principal investigator on the Research Program on Childhood Hunger funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food
and Nutrition Service. He was a member of the National Academies’ Health and Medicine Division Committee on the Examination of the Adequacy of Food Resources and SNAP Allotments, as well as its Committee on National Statistics Panel on the Review and Evaluation of the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation Content and Design. Dr. Ziliak has served as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution and as a visiting professor at University College London and the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin. He served as chair of the Committee on National Statistics’ Workshop on an Agenda for Child Hunger and Food Insecurity Research. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from India.
