Affiliated Faculty

Jason Abaluck

Professor of Economics

Professor Abaluck’s work lies at the intersection of public finance, behavioral economics, health economics and industrial organization. His research focuses on the detection of mistakes and the design of institutions when consumers or providers make mistakes in contexts such as health plan choice, dietary choice, or the provision of medical care.

Julia Adams

Professor of Sociology and International and Area Studies

Julia Adams teaches and conducts research in the areas of state formation; gender and family; social theory; early modern European politics, and colonialism and empire. She is currently studying large-scale forms of patriarchal politics and the historical sociology of agency relations. She was previously the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Rene Almeling

Professor of Sociology

Rene Almeling is a professor of sociology at Yale University with research and teaching interests in gender and medicine. Using a range of qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods, she examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, medical markets, and individual experiences. She is the author of Sex Cells, an award-winning book that offers an inside look at the American market for egg donors and sperm donors.

Joseph Altonji

Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics

Joseph G. Altonji is currently the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University. He previously held faculty positions at Columbia and Northwestern and has served as a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. Altonji specializes in labor economics and applied econometrics. His interests include labor market fluctuations, labor supply, consumption behavior, the economics of education, economic links among family members, race and gender in the labor market, wage determination, and econometric methods.

Akhil Amar

Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science

Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale College, summa cum laude, in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for then Judge (now Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than forty cases—tops in his generation.

Jack Balkin

Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. He is the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and new information technologies. He also directs the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale.

Susan Busch

Professor of Public Health (Health Policy)

Professor Busch is a Professor of Public Health (Health Policy) and former chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Yale School of Public Health. Professor Busch’s research examines the effects of policies and regulations on health care cost and quality. Most of her work focuses on behavioral health. Professor Busch’s work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, an S.M.

Elisa Celis

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science

Elisa Celis is an assistant professor in the Statistics & Data Science department at Yale University. She studies the manifestation of social and economic biases in our online lives via the algorithms that encode and perpetuate them. Her research leverages both experimental and theoretical approaches, and her work spans multiple disciplines including data science, machine learning, fairness in socio-technical systems and algorithm design.

At Yale she co-founded the Computation and Society Initiative.

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.

Curriculum Vitae

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.

Institution for Social and Policy Studies

Advancing Research • Shaping Policy • Developing Leaders

Affiliated Faculty