Welcome! I am the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. I am also the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College. I served as Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024.
My research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. I am a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. I am also one of the faculty leads of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative between HKS, HBS, and HGSE on the future of work. Ben Weidmann and I recently founded the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making.
In 2018 I was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize, for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. In 2022, I won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. My writing appears semi-regularly in the New York Times and (more recently) The Atlantic.
Thanks for visiting!