Team directory

Lara Chausow, Graduate Student, Political Science

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.

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.

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, Visiting Faculty Fellow

Alexandra Cirone is an assistant professor in the Government department at Cornell University.

For academic year 23-24, she is visiting Yale as a faculty fellow in the ISPS Democratic Innovations program, and an assistant professor in the Political Science Department. Here, she is researching the use of lottocratic selection in democracy as well as how polarization affects willingness to participate in modern day citizens’ assemblies.

Ted Cohen, Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases)

Dr. Cohen is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose primary research focus is tuberculosis. He is particularly interested in understanding how TB drug-resistance and medical comorbidities such as HIV frustrate current efforts to control epidemics, with an ultimate goal of developing more effective approaches to limit the morbidity caused by this pathogen. Dr. Cohen’s training is in epidemiology and clinical medicine, and his work includes mathematical modeling, fieldwork, and analysis of programmatic data.

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.

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.