Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members
James P. Ziliak (Chair) is professor and Carol Martin Gatton endowed chair in microeconomics in the Department of Economics, chair of the Economics Department and university research professor at the University of Kentucky, and founding director of the Center for Poverty Research, and founding executive director of the Kentucky Federal Statistical Research Data Center. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, on the advisory board of the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy, and is a research fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Ziliak has served on several National Academies’ committees, including as chair of the Workshop on an Agenda for Child Hunger and Food Insecurity Research and as a member of the Committee on the Examination of the Adequacy of Food Resources and SNAP Allotments. His research interests focus on tax and welfare policy, poverty, and food insecurity. Ziliak is co-editor of Fiscal Studies, a member of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University.
Randall K.Q. Akee is associate professor of public policy in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), chair of the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program at UCLA, Luskin School of Public Affairs, and nonresident fellow in the economic studies program at The Brookings Institution. He also serves as faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, research fellow at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and at the Institute for the Study of Labor, faculty affiliate at the UCLA California Center for Population Research, and faculty affiliate at UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action. Akee’s main research interests are labor economics, economic development, and migration. His current research focuses on income inequality and immobility by race and ethnicity in the United States. Akee has worked on several American Indian reservations, Canadian First Nations, and Pacific Island nations in addition to working in various Native Hawaiian communities. He has a Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University.
Sarah E. Bohn is vice president of research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), where she also holds the John and Louise Bryson chair in policy research and is a member of the PPIC Higher Education Center. As vice president of research, Bohn works with PPIC staff to bring high-quality, nonpartisan research to important policy issues in California. Her own research focuses on the role of social safety net policy and education policy in alleviating poverty and enhancing economic mobility, and also on immigration policy,
labor economics, workforce skills gap, and California’s economy, as well as inequality and mobility. Bohn’s work has been published in major academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Demography, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and The Review of Economics and Statistics. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Indivar Dutta-Gupta is president and executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), where he leads the 501-year-old national nonprofit that develops and implements federal, state, and local policies (in legislation, regulation, and on the ground) that reduce poverty, improve the lives of people with low incomes, and create pathways to racial justice and economic security. Prior to joining CLASP in June 2022, he was co-executive director of Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality (GCPI). There, he led a portfolio of the work that also developed and advanced policy recommendations to alleviate poverty and inequality, and he was an adjunct professor of law. Dutta-Gupta is a board member on several advisory groups, including Indivisible Civics, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Aspen Institute’s Benefits 21 Leadership Advisory Group, and the Liberation in a Generation’s Advisory Group. Prior to joining GCPI, he was senior policy advisor at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and served as professional staff in the U.S. House of Representatives for the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support. Dutta-Gupta has served as the Bill Emerson national hunger fellow, consultant to the Poverty Task Force at the Center for American Progress, and as a food stamp outreach specialist at DC Hunger Solutions. He was named a Champion for Children by the First Focus Campaign for Children and was awarded the Congressional Hunger Center Alumni Leadership Award. He has a B.A. in law, letters, and society from the University of Chicago.
Ingrid Gould Ellen is Paulette Goddard professor of urban policy and planning and faculty director at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University. She teaches courses in microeconomics, urban economics, and urban policy research. Ellen’s research interests center on housing and urban policy. She has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters relating to housing policy, community development, and school and neighborhood segregation. Ellen has held visiting positions at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Urban Institute, and the Brookings Institution. She serves on the editorial boards of numerous journals in public policy, economics, and urban planning, and she will serve as the president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association in 2023. She has a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.
Bradley L. Hardy is associate professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. Prior to this, he was associate professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University, where he also served as department chair. Hardy is a nonresident senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a research fellow in the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a research affiliate of both the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. His research interests focus on labor economics (with an emphasis on economic instability), intergenerational mobility, poverty policy, racial economic inequality, and socioeconomic outcomes. Hardy is on the executive board of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, and is a member of the American Economic Association, National Economic Association, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and Society of Government Economists. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Kentucky.
David S. Johnson is a senior program officer at the Committee on National Statistics at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. For most of the panel’s deliberations, he was a research professor in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and director of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Johnson’s research interests include the measurement of inequality and mobility (using income, consumption, and wealth), the effects of tax rebates, equivalence scale estimation, poverty measurement, and price indexes, and his research focuses primarily on inequality and poverty measurement, equivalence scale estimation, and consumption. He is a member
of numerous organizations, including the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, American Economic Association, Population Association of America, and the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, National Bureau of Economic Research. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota.
Sanders Korenman is professor in the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY). At CUNY, he also holds appointments on the doctoral faculty in the CUNY Graduate Center and as faculty associate in the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. Prior to joining CUNY, he held positions at the University of Minnesota and Princeton University. Korenman was senior economist to the Council of Economic Advisers. His research interests focus on public policy, public finance, and heath economics. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Korenman and Dahlia Remler have developed a poverty measure that includes a basic need for health care and incorporates health insurance benefits. He has been a member of the National Academies Committee on Promoting Child and Family Well-being through Family Work Policies and a member of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families. Korenman has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Helen G. Levy is research professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy at the University of Michigan, the Institute for Social Research, and the Ford School of Public Policy. She also serves as research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was senior economist to the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in Washington, DC. Currently, Levy is the associate director on the Health and Retirement Study, a long-running longitudinal study of health and economic dynamics at older ages. She is a member of the American Economic Association and the American Society of Health Economists. Levy’s research interests include the causes and consequences of lacking health insurance, evaluation of public health insurance programs, and the role of health literacy in explaining disparities in health outcomes. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.
Jordan D. Matsudaira is deputy undersecretary of education at the Department of Education, associate professor of economics and education policy at Teachers College, Columbia University, visiting associate professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton University, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, nonresident fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York. He was previously an assistant professor of public policy and economics at Cornell University and a Robert Wood Johnson post-doctoral fellow in health policy research at the University of California, Berkeley. Matsudaira’s research focuses on using government administrative data to understand the causal impact of education and labor market policies and institutions on the economic outcomes of low-income Americans. He served on President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers as Chief Economist and he also worked on labor, education, and safety net policies, including gainful employment regulations of for-profit colleges and an expansion of the federal overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act. He has a Ph.D. in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan.
José D. Pacas is the chief of data science and research at Kids First Chicago (K1C), a nonprofit focused on dramatically improving education for Chicago’s children. Prior to joining K1C, Dr. Pacas was a research scientist for the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota. Before joining the MPC, he served as an economist in the Poverty Statistics Branch at the U.S. Census Bureau. His research focuses on the factors influencing poverty transitions, methodological improvements to urban and rural poverty measurement in public-use data, as well as estimating the supplemental poverty measure in the American Community Survey. Dr. Pacas has a Ph.D. in applied economics from the University of Minnesota.
Michele Ver Ploeg is the chief of the Food Assistance Branch of the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she leads a team of economists and social scientists charged with producing data and research on food security, food assistance programs, and food store access. She was previously director of the Food and Health Policy Institute and associate professor of exercise and nutrition sciences in the Milken
Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University. Ver Ploeg was also a study director of the Committee on National Statistics at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where she led studies on data and methods for evaluating welfare reform and estimating eligibility and participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. Ver Ploeg has a Ph.D. in policy analysis and management from Cornell University.
Jane Waldfogel is Compton Foundation Centennial professor for the Prevention of Children’s and Youth Problems at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and co-director of the Columbia Population Research Center. She is also visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Waldfogel’s current research includes studies of poverty and social policy, the impact of public policies on child and family wellbeing, and cross-national differences in inequalities in child health and development. She is a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor, research affiliate at the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, and a senior research affiliate at the National Poverty Center. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Economic Association, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and the Population Association of America. Waldfogel has a Ph.D. in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Barbara L. Wolfe is Richard A. Easterlin professor emerita of economics, population health sciences, and public affairs, and faculty affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses broadly on poverty, education, and health issues. Wolfe’s current projects examine whether housing subsidies lead to less risk-taking among adolescents, and better school performance of children in the household. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, having served on numerous committees including the Board on Children, Youth, and Families; the Roundtable on the Communication and Use of Social and Behavioral Sciences; and the Committee to Evaluate the Supplemental Security Income Disability Program for Children with Mental Disorders. Her recent articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Demography, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Wolfe has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
