Robert Axelrod is the Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. He has appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His books include "The Evolution of Cooperation," "The Complexity of Cooperation," and "Harnessing Complexity" (with Michael D. Cohen).
Axelrod's recent work focuses on how people (especially political elites) make sense out of novel situations. He draws on a wide range of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, psychology, and artificial intelligence. He also has long term interests in international security affairs including cyber issues and Middle East politics.
Axelrod is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was a MacArthur Prize Fellow. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and received his PhD from Yale University. For more information, including a curriculum vitae and access to selected research papers, see Robert Axelrod's personal home page.
Elizabeth Popp Berman is Associate Professor of Organizational Studies and Sociology at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in sociology at Berkeley, and was previously a faculty member at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is author of "Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine" (Princeton University Press 2012), which won several awards, and is currently finishing a second book, "Thinking Like an Economist: How Economics Became the Language of Public Policy." She is a consulting editor of the American Journal of Sociology and on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review and Engaging Science, Technology and Society. She is interested in how expertise is used in public policy, in how numbers are used in organizations, and in disciplinary responses to the reproducibility crisis, among other topics.
Bilal Butt is faculty member in the new School for Environment and Sustainability and a faculty affiliate of the African Studies Center. His research is concerned with the political ecology of pastoralism and protected areas in East Africa. He places a large emphasis on empirical fieldwork to understand the lived geographies of the interactions between pastoralists and wildlife in ecologically diverse regions. He combines various geospatial technologies (such as putting GPS units on cows) with historical and ecological dynamics of dryland environments to understand how people, wildlife and livestock are coping with and adapting to changes in climate and politics. He is also interested in the ways that scientific and technical appraisals of rangeland peoples and environments have misread the landscape, leading to orientalist approaches to development programs. Dr. Butt is an NSF Career Award winner and has published in diverse journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Remote Sensing of Environment, Journal of Applied Ecology and Humanity. He teaches courses on Conservation and Development, Political Ecology, Environmental Security and Conflict, and Environmental Governance.
Michael Craig is an Assistant Professor of Energy Systems at the School for Environment and Sustainability. He primarily researches how to reduce global and local environmental impacts of electric power and other energy systems. In prior work, he quantified the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction potential of new technologies, such as rooftop solar, grid-scale batteries, and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). He focuses on system-level analysis to understand the deployment potential and operations of new technologies given the technical, regulatory, and economic constraints and features of the larger system in which they are embedded. Through system analyses, his research also illuminates how the operations and evolution of energy systems respond to new technologies and other factors, e.g. nonstationary environmental conditions induced by climate change. Michael’s research is often interdisciplinary and involves collaborations with economists, climate scientists, and others.
Melissa Creary is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, Department of Health Management and Policy. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) at Emory University. She also received a B.S. in Biology and Masters in Public Health at Emory. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of public health, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology. She studies the social, cultural, ethical, political and historic tensions of sickle cell disease (SCD) in both the United States and Brazil. In her most recent project, she analyzes how frameworks of biology, social determinants, and policy respond to Brazilian cultural and historical ideas about race, health, identity, and legitimacy. She has been published in Genetics in Medicine, the Huffington Post, and The Journal of Bioethics and was recognized recently by the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America with the National Champion Advocacy award.
Robert Goodspeed, PhD, AICP, is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS), collaborative planning, urban informatics, and scenario planning theory and methods. Within these areas, he has investigated how urban practitioners can effectively use new information technologies, the effectiveness of new practices like online civic crowdfunding, and how urban scenarios can be used to manage uncertainty. He holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.C.P. from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in history from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, which examined the use of planning support systems in spatial planning, received the 2013 Donald Schön Award for Excellence in Learning from Practice from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. His undergraduate thesis, a case study of Detroit's Gratiot Area Redevelopment Project from the early 1950s, sparked his interest in cities and urban planning. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), and serves as a board member of the Consortium for Scenario Planning, and initiative of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Robert C. Hampshire is an associate professor of public policy at the Ford School, a research associate professor in both the U-M Transportation Research Institute's (UMTRI) Human Factors group and Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE). He develops and applies operations research, data science, and systems approaches to public and private service industries. His research focuses on the management and policy analysis of emerging networked industries and innovative mobility services such as smart parking, connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, bike sharing, and car sharing. He has worked extensively with both public and private sector partners worldwide. He is a queueing theorist that uses statistics, stochastic modeling, simulation and dynamic optimization. Hampshire received a PhD in operations research and financial engineering from Princeton University.
Catherine H. Hausman is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research. Her work focuses on environmental and energy economics. Her research has appeared in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Recent projects have looked at the economic and environmental impacts of shale gas; the market impacts of nuclear power plant closures; and the effects of electricity market deregulation on nuclear power safety. Prior to her graduate studies, Catherine studied in Peru under a Fulbright grant. She has taught Statistics, a policy seminar on Energy and the Environment, and a course on Government Regulation of Industry and the Environment. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Joel Howell, MD, PhD, MACP, has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan since 1984. In addition to being the Director of the Medical Arts Program, he is a Senior Associate Director of the University of Michigan Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, the Elizabeth Farrand Professor of the History of Medicine, and a Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine (Medical School), History (College of LSA), and Health Management and Policy (School of Public Health). He earned his medical degree from the University of Chicago and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Chicago Hospitals. At the University of Pennsylvania he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a senior fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He completed his doctorate in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Howell’s research interests focus on the history of medical technology and the medical humanities. He has written widely on the use of medical technology, examining the social and contextual factors relevant to its clinical application and diffusion, analyzing why American medicine has become so obsessed with the use of medical technology. He has recently published on the history of the fiberoptic endoscope and on diagnostic errors to be learned from a near-apocalyptic cold war miscalculation. Recent projects have started to explore the history of medical education in Ethiopia and the history of cardiology in Brazil. He is also writing on the history of human experimentation, on the use of children’s bodies for anatomic study in the early 20th study, and on ideas about heart attacks.
Howell’s publications have appeared widely in the medical and the historical literature. In addition to his medical publications, Howell is the author of “Washtenaw County Bike Rides” (University of Michigan Press).
Muzammil M. Hussain is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media, Faculty Associate at the U-M International Institute and the U-M Institute for Social Research, and Faculty Affiliate at the U-M Ford School of Public Policy’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). Dr. Hussain’s interdisciplinary research is at the intersections of global communication, social analytics, and technology governance. At Michigan, Professor Hussain teaches courses on digital politics, research methods, and global innovation. He has authored numerous research articles, book chapters, and industry reports examining global ICT politics, innovation, and policy, including pieces in The Journal of Democracy, The Journal of International Affairs, The Brookings Institutions’ Issues in Technology and Innovation, The InterMedia Institute’s Development Research Series, International Studies Review, International Journal of Middle East Affairs, The Communication Review, Policy and Internet, and Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism.
Dr. Michael Imperiale is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology in the Medical School. He also serves as Associate Vice President for Research – Research Policy and Compliance at the University of Michigan. Dr. Imperiale’s research interests focus on the study of DNA tumor viruses. He has served on several National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committees addressing the issues of responsible conduct of research, dual use life sciences research, and the intersection of science and security, and has published extensively on these topics. Most recently, he chaired a study entitled "Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology." He was as an inaugural member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity from 2005-2014, previously served on the Planetary Protection Subcommittee at NASA, and currently serves on the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law at the National Academies.
Nkem Khumbah is a lecturer and member of the STEM-Africa Initiative at the University of Michigan. He holds a Doctorate degree from George Mason University. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Michigan, Khumbah was an Assistant Professor of mathematics at North Georgia College and State University. He also held research fellowships at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA and the Mathematical Science Research Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. His research has been on development and application of mathematical structures that facilitate the compression of massive data sets with minimal distortion to the statistical structure of the data.
An avid ambassador of international scientific capacity and human development, he was founder and chair of the Buea (Cameroon) International Conference Series on the Mathematical Sciences (2009 — 2013).
He has been consulting for and closely working with multiple regional and international organizations, including the African Union, select African governments, the World Bank African Centers of Excellence Project, UNESCO, Washington-based Constituency for Africa (CFA), the Association of African Universities, the African Network of Science and Technology Institutes (ANSTI), among others. He served in 2015 as Founding Executive Curator of the Next Einstein Forum (NEF): Africa's Global Forum for Science, Policy and Society. He served as the Science and Technology chair of the first ever African Continental Summit on Higher Education in 2015, and co-authored recommendations that were adopted by the African Union, at its establishment of a Committee of 10 African Heads of States as continental Champions of Science and Education. He currently serves on the steering Committee of the African Light Source Initiative, and as a Senior Fellow of the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils.
His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the New York Times and the African Policy Review, and he continues to present at numerous conferences and symposia as keynote speaker, panel member and speaker in North America, Africa, Asia, and South America.
Anna Kirkland J.D., Ph.D., is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science, and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood (New York University Press, 2008) and co-editor with Jonathan Metzl of Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York University Press, 2010). Her new book Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury has recently been published by New York University Press in December 2016. In Vaccine Court, Kirkland explores how activists and government actors come to know, identify, and compensate for vaccine injuries, and what recent debates over vaccine safety reveal about democratic engagement with volatile scientific questions in the contemporary United States. Recent articles include also "Power and Persuasion in the Vaccine Debates: An Analysis of Political Efforts and Outcomes in the States, 1998-2012," "Critical Approaches to Wellness," "Credibility Battles in the Autism Litigation," "The Legitimacy of Vaccine Critics: What's Left after Autism?," and "The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism." Kirkland recently received a National Science Foundation grant to study the organizational handling of rights claims against sex discrimination in health care settings under the Affordable Care Act.
Paula Lantz is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and a professor of public policy at the Ford School. She most recently was professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. From 1994-2011, she was faculty member at the University of Michigan with a primary appointment in the School of Public Health, and affiliations with the Ford School and the Institute for Social Research. Dr. Lantz, a social demographer, studies the role of public health in health care reform, clinical preventive services (such as cancer screening and prenatal care), and social inequalities in health. She is particularly interested in the role of health care versus broad social policy aimed at social determinants of health in reducing social disparities in health status. She is currently doing research regarding the potential of social impact bonds to reduce Medicaid expenditures. Lantz received an MA in sociology from Washington University, St. Louis, and an MS in epidemiology and PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin..
Anne Petersen has been involved with STPP in a variety of roles over the past three decades. She currently chairs the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Division of Policy and Global Affairs, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine Global Health Board, and is a faculty affiliate of UM's Africa Studies Center STEM Africa initiative working to develop Africa using science, technology, and innovation (STI). She also leads the secretariat for the International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies, is a Director of the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Founder/President of the Global Philanthropy Alliance, among other committees and boards. She was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the US Senate as Deputy Director of the National Science Foundation in the 1990's. She is a Research professor at UM in the Center for Human Growth and Development. Her degrees are all from the University of Chicago, in mathematics and statistics.
Nicholson Price is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He holds a PhD in Biology and a JD, both from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard. He teaches patents and health law, and studies innovation in the life sciences, with a recent focus on big data and machine learning in medicine. He recommends reading Bujold, Butcher, and Brust. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, the Michigan Law Review, the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and elsewhere. Nicholson is a cofounder of Regulation and Innovation in the Biosciences.
Barry Rabe is a Professor of Public Policy in the Ford School and also holds appointments in the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Program in the Environment. He is a non-resident senior fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Much of his recent research examines state and regional development of policies to reduce greenhouse gases, which has been conducted in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. In 2006, Rabe became the first social scientist to receive a Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in recognition of his contribution to both scholarship and policy making. His 2004 Brookings book, Statehouse and Greenhouse: The Evolving Politics of American Climate Change Policy, received the 2005 Lynton Keith Caldwell Award from the American Political Science Association in recognition of the best book published on environmental politics and policy in the past three years.
Rabe has also written extensively about such topics as nuclear and hazardous waste management, cross-border and cross-media transfer of pollutants in federal regulatory systems, and the conditions necessary to achieve intergovernmental cooperation in the implementation of federal grant and regulatory programs. During the 2008-09 year, he was a visiting professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he organized the National Conference on Climate Governance and edited a series of subsequent publications. In 2004, he completed a ten-year term as editor of the American Governance and Public Policy book series for Georgetown University Press. At Michigan, he previously served as Director of the Program in the Environment and as Interim Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment. In 2007, he received the Daniel Elazar Award for Career Contribution to the Study of Federalism from the American Political Science Association. In 2009, he was named a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Kaitlin Raimi is an Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She studies how social motivations promote or prevent sustainable behaviors, especially those related to climate change. She particularly interested in how people compare their own beliefs and behaviors to those of other people, how the desire to make a good impression can influence people to mitigate climate change, and how one adopting one sustainable behavior affects subsequent environmental decisions. Raimi also has ongoing work on how different ways of framing climate change affect people's attitudes to climate policy, including whether learning about new technologies to combat climate change might affect support for regulatory mitigation policies. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment and Climate Change Research Network at Vanderbilt University. She received a BA in psychology from Tufts University, and an MA and PhD in Social Psychology from Duke University.
Tony G. Reames is an assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, Director of the Urban Energy Justice Lab, and a JPB Environmental Health Fellow at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He has a PhD in public administration from The University of Kansas, a Masters in engineering management from Kansas State University, and a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University. Dr. Reames conducts research in the emerging field of energy justice, which investigates fair and equitable access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy technology. His research employs energy analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), and policy analysis tools to investigate disparities in residential energy dynamics focusing on the production and persistence of spatial, racial, and socioeconomic inequality.
Joy Rohde is an associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. She is also a faculty member in the Science, Technology, and Society Program and the Department of History. Her work examines the relationship between the social and behavioral sciences and the American state from the late 19th century to the present. Her first book, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), investigates the Cold War origins and contemporary consequences of Pentagon social research contracting for national security. She is currently working on a book project that explores how ideas about cybernetics and advances in computing impacted the social sciences, policy analysis, and national security in the United States since the 1960s. Prior to joining the Ford School, Rohde was an assistant professor of history at Trinity University, and she has held fellowships from the Miller Center of Public Affairs and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Christian Sandvig is the H. Marshall McLuhan Collegiate Professor of Digital Media with faculty appointments in the School of Information and Communication Studies. He is a social researcher studying the public policy implications of algorithmic systems that curate and organize culture using information technology. Sandvig was previously a computer programmer with government, start-up, and Fortune 500 experience; he taught at the University of Illinois and Oxford University and has worked as an academic visitor at MIT, Harvard, Intel, and Microsoft Research. He holds the Ph.D and M.A. from Stanford University and the B.A. from the University of California, Davis. Sandvig was previously named a "next-generation leader in science and technology policy" by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the NSF CAREER award in human-centered computing. His group blog was named one of the "Must-Follow Feeds" in science, culture, and design by Wired.
Perrin Selcer works at the intersections of environmental history, history of the human sciences, science and technology studies, and international relations. His first major research project showed how experts affiliated with UN agencies made the global human environment a central concern of the international community. His current research explores how knowledge and narratives about the origins of the Holocene informs contemporary anxieties about and responses to global environmental crisis. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.
Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School and the Chief of the Research Ethics Service in the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine, is a lawyer/bioethicist who focuses on the secondary research use of health data and biospecimens. Prof. Spector received her J.D. and M.Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and School of Medicine respectively after graduating from Middlebury College. She completed a research fellowship in bioethics at Michigan Medicine. She is also a former practicing drug and device attorney and was Associate Director of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues under President Obama (2010-2015).
Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D. is Professor of American Culture and History, with appointments in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Women&rquo;s Studies at the University of Michigan. She also is a core faculty member in the Latina/o Studies Program and the Science, Technology, and Society Program. Her research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America which was published in second edition by University of California Press in 2015. Her latest book, Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) was a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences. She leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which studies qualitative and quantitative patterns of eugenic sterilization in twentieth-century California; this research is informing policy efforts to provide redress to survivors of compulsory sterilization. Stern has held numerous grants for her work in medical history and health policy, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. He is the author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Until 2009, Toyama was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorest communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. His work has been mentioned by the New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. Prior to his time in India, Toyama did computer vision and multimedia research and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.
James Wells is Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. He has also been staff member or resident scholar at three international physics laboratories (CERN in Switzerland/France, DESY in Germany and SLAC in California). He has served on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP) that guides high-energy physics research for the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. In these capacities he has lead or co-lead numerous studies for decision making bodies on large-scale (multi-billion dollar) research infrastructure projects both in the United States and abroad. He was also selected by the American Physical Society to serve as a member and subsequently chair of the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA), which oversees the creation, adoption and advocacy for policy positions taken in Washington by the Society. His activities and research interests in policy have been at the intersection of "big science" and national security, focusing on the various scientific and sociological factors that impact decision making and policy for large-scale science projects and initiatives, including those that impact national security through sensitive international engagement, stable scientific infrastructure concerns, and large-scale defense(-related) programs and initiatives.
Post-doctoral Fellows
Beza Merid is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, affiliated with the National Center for Institutional Diversity, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program. His research examines how patients, caregivers, health institutions, and policy makers shape what it means to be a "responsible" patient in public and health policy discourses. He is in the process of writing a series of five journal articles that explore the relationship between health activism, the Affordable Care Act, and the ongoing effort to retrench coverage benefits provided under this law. The first article in this series, published in March 2019 and titled “Fight For Our Health: Activism in the Face of Health Insurance Precarity,” can be found in BioSocieties. He is on the tenure-track job market during the 2019-2020AY. Merid received his Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU, his M.A. in African American Studies from UCLA, and his B.A. in Comparative Literature from USC.