Team directory: C
Team directory: C
Guillermo Carranza, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow, 2026
Guillermo Carranza is a PhD candidate in Economics at Yale University. His research focuses on household finance, public economics, and applied microeconomics, with particular emphasis on how people save for retirement and protect against economic risk. He combines large-scale administrative datasets with survey methods to understand the complexities behind financial decision-making. As an ISPS Fellow, Guillermo will examine how households insure against income shocks and whether this insurance is distributed equally between spouses.
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.
Kerwin Charles, Indra K. Nooyi Dean & Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management
Kerwin K. Charles is the Indra K. Nooyi Dean & Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM). He has studied and published on a range of topics, including earnings and wealth inequality, conspicuous consumption, race and gender labor market discrimination, health and the labor market, the effects of housing booms and busts, and non-employment in the economy.
Lara Chausow, Graduate Student, Political Science
Email: lara.chausow@yale.edu
Lara Chausow is a graduate student who studies American Politics, with a focus on Congress, lobbying, and interest groups. Prior to entering graduate school, she conducted research and advocacy for government ethics and campaign finance reform at Public Citizen in Washington, DC.
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.
Alex William Chen, ISPS Director's Fellow, 2026
Alex William Chen is a sophomore in Morse College studying History and Political Science from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He is interested in the federalization of American citizenship and the recurrence of nativist cycles in the United States. On campus, Alex serves in the YCC as the Speaker of the Undergraduate Senate and works as a research assistant for Sterling Professor of History David Blight. Recently, he completed an internship with the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security (119th, Minority) where he focused on immigration policies.
Ethan Chiu, Dahl Scholar, 2025-2026
Ethan Chiu is a BA/MPP student at Yale University studying Global Affairs and History, with a passion for technology, national security, and industrial policy. He was most recently a fellow on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and Red Cell Partners. Previously, he served as a Director’s Fellow at the Yale Digital Ethics Center, where he researched the evolution of labor conditions in American, Taiwanese, Japanese, and German semiconductor supply chains from the 1960s to the present. He also worked as a research program manager for Dr.
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.