Team directory
Team directory
Danil Dmitriev, Postdoctoral Associate
Danil Dmitriev is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego in 2023. His research interests lie in microeconomic theory, particularly in the areas of political economy, organizational economics, and social learning.
Jessica Duda, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2025
Jessica Duda is a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology. Her research investigates cognitive mechanisms of depression and anxiety, integrating self-report, behavioral tasks, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. She is particularly interested in how people perceive and cope with uncertain conditions across development, and the role of these processes in internalizing pathology. As an ISPS fellow, she is examining how uncertainty around the current legislative climate contributes to anxiety and depression in LGBTQ+ youth.
Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy, School of the Environment and Clinical Professor of Environmental Law & Policy, Yale Law School
Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments at Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management. He serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and co-director of the Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance.
Amir Fairdosi, Lecturer in Political Science, Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics
Amir Shawn Fairdosi is a Lecturer in Political Science and an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics. He teaches classes on American politics, legislative procedure, and political socialization. His current research examines how political institutions influence political attitudes and behavior.
Justin Farrell, Professor of Sociology
Justin Farrell is a professor and author at Yale University, School of the Environment.
He studies culture and environment, with a focus on social class, moral conflict, and epistemology. He blends ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities with large-scale computational techniques from network science and machine learning.
Eli Fenichel, Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics
Eli Fenichel’s research approaches natural resource management and sustainability as a portfolio management problem by considering natural resources as a form of capital. He is interested in how people can and do allocate natural resources and natural resource risks through time. This leads to a strong interest in feedbacks among humans, ecosystems, and the management of coupled ecological-economic processes. His research is applied in a wide variety of systems including: natural capital valuation, fisheries, infectious disease, groundwater, tropical forests, and grasslands.
Sarina Fereydooni, ISPS Director's Fellow 2025
Sarina Fereydooni is a junior in Ezra Stiles College on the pre-law track majoring in intensive Political Science and pursuing a Global Health Certificate. Her research focuses on accessibility barriers to federally funded social safety net programs and their impact on public health outcomes. On campus, she serves as a Project Leader for the Yale Undergraduate Legal Aid Association, works with the Yale Law School Lowenstein Project, and is part of a Yale School of Public Health research team dedicated to training refugees as community healthcare workers.
Zainab Firdausi, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2025
Zainab Firdausi is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Theory. She is currently writing her dissertation which investigates plural conceptions of political legitimacy of the administrative state. A strong believer of the need to interact policy with theory, her research interests span democratic theory, economic inequality, modern US history, and legal history. Through ISPS, Zainab seeks to study the quality of democratic participation in administrative policymaking.
Maxwell Fisher, ISPS Director's Fellow 2025
Max is a junior in Grace Hopper College majoring in History with a concentration in International and Diplomatic History. He is particularly interested in government efficiency, focusing on how regulations and bureaucratic processes can hinder policy implementation. He also studies the political consequences of deindustrialization and the loss of faith in democratic institutions. Max has held several policy and research positions, most recently working on American foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Howard Forman, Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging; Professor of Economics, Management, and Public Health (Health Policy)
Howie Forman is a Professor of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, Public Health (Health Policy), Management, and Economics at Yale University. He came to Yale as a practicing diagnostic radiologist and remains an active clinician in the YNHH Emergency Room, where he also functions as the deputy operational chief for Radiology. Since 1998, he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on healthcare policy, economics, finance, and leadership.