Team directory
Team directory
Xi Chen, Associate Professor, School of Public Health
Professor Chen is a health and development economist. He recently completed his Ph.D. in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China.
James Choi, Professor of Finance
James Choi is a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management. His primary research is in household finance and behavioral finance; his work on automatic enrollment has led to changes in pension plan design around the world. He has also published research on the effects of social identity and how to use psychology to increase preventive health behaviors.
Nicholas Christakis, Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Nicholas Christakis is Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Internal Medicine & Biomedical Engineering, and he conducts research on social factors that affect health, health care, and longevity. Dr. Christakis was recently recruited to Yale from Harvard, where he is the Director of the Human Nature Lab and the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His current work involves the application of network science and mathematical models to understand the dynamics of health in longitudinally evolving networks.
Alexandra Cirone, External Faculty Fellow
Alexandra “Ali” Cirone is an assistant professor in the London School of Economics’ School of Public Policy (SPP) and has a joint appointment in the Government Department. She also holds a research appointment at the BI Norwegian Business School, and she is a non-resident fellow in the Democratic Innovations Program at Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. She is one of the editors and co-founders of Broadstreet.blog, a blog on historical political economy.
Zack Cooper, Associate Professor of Public Health and Economics
Zack Cooper is an Associate Professor of Public Health and Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. He also serves as Director of Health Policy at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Professor Cooper is a health economist whose work is focused on producing data-driven scholarship that can inform public policy.
Ana De La O, Associate Professor of Political Science
Ana De La O Torres is an associate professor of political science and in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, with affiliations at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism, and the provision of public goods.
Kevin DeLuca, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Kevin DeLuca is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and resident fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. His research interests include political economy and political representation, with a focus on elections, election laws, and the role of the media in the political process.
Jessica Duda, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2025
Jessica Duda is a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology. Her research investigates cognitive mechanisms of depression and anxiety, integrating self-report, behavioral tasks, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. She is particularly interested in how people perceive and cope with uncertain conditions across development, and the role of these processes in internalizing pathology. As an ISPS fellow, she is examining how uncertainty around the current legislative climate contributes to anxiety and depression in LGBTQ+ youth.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, School of the Environment and Clinical Professor of Environmental Law & Policy, Yale Law School
Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments at Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management. He serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and co-director of the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance.
Amir Fairdosi, Lecturer in Political Science, Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics
Amir Shawn Fairdosi is a Lecturer in Political Science and an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics. He teaches classes on American politics, legislative procedure, and political socialization. His current research examines how political institutions influence political attitudes and behavior.