Robert Fairlie

I am a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UCLA, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). I study a wide range of topics including entrepreneurship, education, labor, racial, gender and caste inequality, information technology, immigration, health, and development. I strive for my research to have a broad impact by providing rigorous, unbiased and objective evidence on questions that are important for society and often involve highly-charged policy debates. My methodological focus is on conducting randomized control field experiments, employing advanced econometric techniques and identification strategies, and working with and building large administrative datasets. Publications from my research have appeared in leading journals in economics, policy, management, science, and medicine.

 

I received a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. with honors from Stanford University. I have held visiting positions at Stanford University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, and Australian National University. I have received funding for my research from the National Science Foundation, National Academies and Russell Sage Foundation as well as numerous government agencies and foundations, and have testified in front of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly. Recent awards and honors include a joint resolution from the California State Assembly, Choice Academic Title award, and the Bradford-Osborne research award in both 2020 and 2021. I am regularly interviewed by the media to comment on economic, education, entrepreneurship, inequality and policy issues.

 

 

 

My new book on entrepreneurship, job creation and survival just came out at MIT Press.

 

 

 

 

For more information on my research, teaching, and policy work, please visit: https://rfairlie.sites.ucsc.edu/

 

John Villasenor

John Villasenor is a professor of public policy, electrical and computer engineering, management, and law at UCLA, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. Villasenor’s work considers the technology, policy, and legal issues arising from key technology trends including the growth of artificial intelligence, the increasing complexity and interdependence of today’s networks and systems, and continued advances in computing and communications.

He has written for the AtlanticBillboard, the Chronicle of Higher EducationFast CompanyForbes, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific AmericanSlate, and the Washington Post, and for many academic journals. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, Villasenor was with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed methods of imaging the earth from space. He holds a B.S. from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

For more information, please visit Professor Villasenor’s personal page.

Aaron Panofsky

Aaron Panofsky is a Professor in Public Policy and the Institute for Society and Genetics. Prior to joining UCLA in January of 2008, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at UC Berkeley from 2006 through 2007. Panofsky received his Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 2006.

Panofsky’s main research interest is in the sociology of science and knowledge with a special focus on genetics. He recently published his first book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (Chicago, 2014), is an analysis of the causes and consequences of controversy in the field of behavioral genetics. A second major project is investigating how patient advocate groups are seeking to affect the research process in the medical genetics of rare disorders. Of particular interest are the means by which patient advocates and scientists can form successful, mutually beneficial collaborative partnerships. These and other projects fit with his abiding science policy interests in the governance of science and technology and the relationship between expertise and democracy.

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