Faculty Fellows

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.

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.

P. M. Aronow

Associate Professor of Political Science

P. M. Aronow is Associate Professor, with tenure, in the Department of Political Science. Professor Aronow’s research considers theory, methods, and practice in the study of human behavior.

Curriculum Vitae

Kate Baldwin

Associate Professor of Political Science

Kate Baldwin is the Peter Strauss Family assistant professor of political science. She studies the political economy of developing countries, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her current research projects analyze politics in weak states. In these contexts, she is interested in how community-level institutions – such as traditional leaders and NGOs – interact with the national state to affect development, democracy and conflict.

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

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.

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.

Alexander Coppock

Associate Professor of Political Science

Alexander Coppock is Assistant Professor of Political Science and a resident fellow of the Institution for Social Policy Studies and Center for the Study of American Politics. He received his Ph. D. in political science from Columbia University (2016). His principal research interest lies in political persuasion and its implications for the malleability of public opinion in the context of elections. His interests extend beyond persuasion to the design and analysis of randomized experiments.