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

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.

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.