Team directory

Team directory

Benjamin Polak, William C Brainard Professor of Economics; Professor of Management

Professor Polak is an expert on decision theory, game theory, and economic history. His work explores economic agents whose goals are richer than those captured in traditional models. His work on game theory ranges from foundational theoretical work on common knowledge, to applied topics in corporate finance and law and economics. Most recently, he has made contributions to the theory of repeated games with asymmetric information. Other research interests include economic inequality and individuals’ responses to uncertainty.

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Matthew Quintos, ISPS Director's Fellow 2023

Matthew Quintos is a sophomore majoring in political science at Yale University. At Yale, he works as a research assistant at Yale Law School and a student worker in the Yale Office of General Counsel. Quintos is an active member of the Yale Political Union. He is particularly interested in comparative politics, constitutional law, and voting rights issues. After graduation, he hopes to attend law school and work in civil rights law.

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Alison Renna, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Alison Renna is a PhD candidate in Religion and Modernity and the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. As an ISPS Fellow, Renna is researching the effect of the reception of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1904 decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts on the preamble’s status in constitutional law. Through this ISPS fellowship, Renna is researching the consequence of returning the preamble to constitutional interpretation, with a focus on how returning “ourselves and our posterity” as equal stakeholders in US law would re-shape environmental law in the United States.

Jennifer Richeson

Jennifer Richeson, Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology

Jennifer Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology and a faculty fellow with ISPS. Her research examines multiple psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity. For instance, she examines how people experience racial and other forms of societal diversity, be it efforts to navigate one-on-one interracial interactions or the political consequences of the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the United States.

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Emily Ritchie, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Emily Ritchie is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology. Her research focuses on the psychology behind attitude change, aiming to understand when and how we can change people’s attitudes toward individuals, groups, and policies. In her dissertation, she shows how spacing out new information (v.s. consuming it all at once) can more effectively change both implicit and explicit attitudes, hoping to inform the design of public interventions, such as anti-bias efforts and health campaigns.

Laila Robbins, Yale College, History

Laila Robbins is a junior at Yale studying History with a focus on pathologization. At Yale Law School, she currently researches discretionary sentencing enhancements for repeat drug offenders. Previously, Laila interned for Honorable Katherine B. Forrest (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York). On campus, as Vice President of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project, Laila mentors inmates at a Connecticut prison and facilitates re-entry initiatives in New Haven.

John Roemer

John Roemer, Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics

John Roemer is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Professor of Political Science and Economics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and has been a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. His research concerns political economy, and distributive justice. He is currently teaching Political Competition and a Workshop in Political Economy. Publications include: Political Competition, Harvard University Press, 2001; Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998, Theories of Distributive Justice, Harvard University Press, 1996.

ISPS Faculty Fellow

Doug Rogers, Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Douglas Rogers is Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests in political and economic anthropology; natural resources (especially oil) and energy; corporations; the anthropology of religion and ethics; historical anthropology; and socialist societies and their postsocialist trajectories.

Joseph Ross

Joseph Ross, Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and Public Health (Health Policy and Management)

Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS, is a Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) and of Public Health (Health Policy and Management), a member of the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE) at the Yale-New Haven Hospital, and an Co-Director of the National Clinician Scholars program (NCSP) at Yale.

Kevin Sabet, Assistant Professor Adjunct/ Yale School of Medicine

Author, consultant, former advisor to three U.S. presidential administrations, and assistant professor, Kevin A. Sabet, Ph.D., has researched and implemented drug policy for more than 20 years. In 2011 he stepped down as senior advisor in President Obama’s drug policy office, having been the only drug policy staffer to have ever served as a political appointee in a Democrat and Republican administration.