Academics : Faculty Biographies

Department of Economics

• Miguel Urquiola (SIPA)  Assistant Professor Urquiola’s (Ph.D, University of California Berkeley, 2000) research focuses on the economics of education, drawing on development and public economics to study markets and educational policies.  Professor Urquiola is in the process of considering ways in which policymakers have sought to improve school performance by introducing school choice and competition, increasing inputs or funding, and by relying on information to hold schools accountable.  She is also interested in the impact of school choice on stratification and educational outcomes, and class size determination

Barnard Department of Economics

• Mariana Colacelli  Assistant Professor Colacelli (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2005) has been teaching at Barnard College since 2005.  She instructs Intermediate Macroeconomics, International Trade and Senior Seminar on Economic Growth. Prior to coming to Barnard, she was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching at Harvard University. Professor Colacelli has studied the use of multiple currencies in trade during the Argentine recession of 2001 and has also studied the impact of exchange rate depreciations on international trade.

• Randall Reback  Assistant Professor Reback (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2003) joined the Barnard faculty in 2003. In addition to his teaching duties for the department of economics, Professor Reback is affilated with Barnard's urban studies program.  He has taught such courses as "Introduction to Microeconomics," "Econometrics," "Economics of Education," and "Spatial Analysis in Urban Economics."Professor Reback has a particular interest in the economics of education.   His work has been recognized by awards from the AERA/NSF/Institute for Education Sciences Research, the American Education Finance Association, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

• Sanjay Reddy  Assistant Professor Reddy (Ph.D., Harvard, 2000)  joined the faculty of Barnard in 2000.  At Barnard Professor Reddy is affiliated with the economics and human rights studies programs. He also teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.  Professor Reddy's areas of research and teaching include development economics, international economics, and economics and philosophy. He has consulted extensively for United Nations organizations, NGOs, and the World Bank and has served on the editorial advisory boards for Development, Ethics and International Affairs; the European Journal of Development Research; and the Review of Income and Wealth.

• David Weiman, Faculty Affiliate   Faculty Affiliate Weiman (Ph.D., Stanford, 1984) is an Alena Wels Hirschorn Professor of Economics at Barnard College and Member of the History Graduate Faculty at Columbia University. He is also Senior Research Associate of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College. An economic historian by training, his current research in this area focuses on the historical evolution and regulation of payments system and telecommunications networks and on the historical evolution of metropolitan centers as nodes in communications and financial networks. With co-author John James (Virginia), he is working on From the Second Bank to the Federal Reserve, which analyzes the transformation of the U.S. payments system in the absence of a central bank and explains the origins of the Fed from the perspective of the payments system. He is also researching the systemic limits to financial development in U.S. south after the Civil War.

Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health

• Andrew Rundle  Associate Professor (PhD., Columbia University, 2000), Dr. Andrew Rundle’s research focuses on physical activity and body weight with a primary interest in whether sedentary lifestyles and overweight/obesity are risk factors for cancer development. This work includes investigations of the determinants of physical activity and body weight, creating new methods to measure physical activity, molecular epidemiologic investigations of mechanisms through which physical activity may prevent cancer, and studies of associations between activity and cancer incidence. Dr. Rundle also is involved in a project investigating whether environmental exposures cause prostate cancer. In addition to his teaching responsibilities at the Mailman School, which include the Environmental Epidemiology and Molecular Epidemiology courses, he lectures at the School of Social Work and teaches epidemiology to journalism students at NYU. Dr. Rundle also is involved with IARC's international training workshops on Molecular Epidemiology. .

Columbia University Department of History

• Bradley Abrams   Associate Professor Abrams (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1997) is Associate Director of the Harriman Institute and also teaches European History in the Columbia History Department (including such courses as “East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century”  and “Creating Post-Marxism Across the Iron Curtain ”).  Recent publications include The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation:  Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (2004) for the Harvard Cold War Book Series in addition to a number of articles in various historical journals such as East European Politics and Europaische Revue.

Department of Political Science

• Tanisha Fazal Assistant Professor Fazal’s (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2001) interests inclue international security, international relations theory, sovereignty, international law, and organization theory.  Her current research projects focus on changing compliance with the laws of war, state failure, and the relationship between geography and conflict and her book, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007), won the 2008 Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association's Conflict Processes Section. She has been a fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. In 2002 she was awarded the Helen Dwight Reid Award of the American Political Science Association. 

• Page Fortna   Associate Professor Fortna (Ph.D., Harvard, 1998) is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her interests include international security, peacekeeping, and war termination and her current research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars. She is the author of  Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.  She has been a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2004-2005) and a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003).

•  Lucy Goodhart  Assistant Professor Goodhart (Ph.D., Harvard, 2002) has studied at the universities of Oxford and Harvard. Her interests include comparative institutions,  West European and EU Politics, monetary policy and technocratic delegation, voting behavior, and political parties.  Her research focuses on the interaction between political institutions and economic policy. Professor Goodhart’s thesis, Moderating Passions? Coalition Government and Policy Cycles in Advanced, Industrialized Nations, analyzed the impact of coalition government on incentives and policy actions among 17 industrialized nations from 1973 to 1992. This work integrated results from voting theory, political economy and the formal modeling of executive behavior. Her current research project, undertaken with Alison Alter of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, examines the interaction between asset markets and politics, in the U.S. and abroad.

• Kimuli Kasara  Professor Kasara ( Ph.D., Stanford, 2006) teaches Political Science at Columbia, including such classes as “Democratization and Regime Change in Developing Countries” and “Contemporary African Politics”.  She focused her dissertation on ethnic politics in Africa and on African political economy. Her current work concerns colonialism in East Africa, communal violence and political parties.  Her recent published work includes the articles Tax Me If You Can: Ethnic Geography, Democracy, and the Taxation of Agriculture in Africa and Ethnic Minority Rule and Civil War Onset for the American Political Science Review. 

• Robert Shapiro, Faculty Affiliate Schapiro (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1982) specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods.  Professor Shapiro has published numerous articles in major academic journals. He is a coauthor of The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences with Benjamin I. Page (University of Chicago 1992) and Politicians Don't Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness with Lawrence R. Jacobs (University of Chicago 2000).  He currently serves on the editorial boards of Political Science Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. His current research examines American national policymaking, political leadership, and opinion from 1960 to the present.

Department of Psychology

• Tor Wager   Assistant Professor Wager (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2003) is affiliated with the Columbia Department of Psychology’s Cognitive and Affective Control Laboratory.  His interests include the neural and psychological bases of cognitive and affective control. Professir Wager’s research quantifies behavioral performance and brain activity--measured primarily using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)--to investigate the neural mechanisms by which humans have flexible control over their behavior. This approach emphasizes the mutual constraints on interpretation afforded by studying behavior and functional anatomy at the same time. He is interested in developing image analysis and statistical modeling methods that will improve the ability to use fMRI as a research tool in cognitive and affective neuroscience.

QMSS / Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University

• Peter Bearman (Sociology), Former Director of ISERP  Professor Bearman (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1985) is Director the Lazarsfeld Center for the Social Sciences, as well as the Cole Professor of Social Science, and Co-Director of the Health & Society Scholars Program. He was the founding director of ISERP, serving from the Institute's launch in 2000 until 2008. A recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2007, Bearman is currently investigating the social determinants of the autism epidemic. Current projects also include an ethnographic study of the funeral industry and, with support from the American Legacy Foundation, an investigation of the social and economic consequences of tobacco control policy. He has also conducted research in historical sociology, including Relations into Rhetorics: Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540-1640 (Rutgers, 1993). He is also the author of Doormen (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

• Sam Field, University of Pennsylvania  Professor Field (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania), a sociologist, is currently a research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an investigator for the Columbia interdisciplinary Built Environment and Health (BEH) project.  His research interests focus on a variety of methodological issues surrounding the quantitative analysis of spatially referenced data collected in the fields of health and criminology.

• Jennifer Hill, Faculty Affiliate  Faculty Affiliate Hill (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2000) works at the intersection of social policy research and methodological development. She is interested in methods and study designs that allow researchers to go beyond making purely associational observations to actually be able to answer causal questions. In particular she focuses on situations in which it is difficult or impossible to perform traditional randomized experiments,or when even seemingly pristine study designs are complicated by missing data or hierarchically structured data. Hill has published in a variety of leading journals including Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Public Health, and Developmental Psychology.

• Bill McAllister, Faculty Affiliate  Dr. McAllister (Ph.D., University of Chicago,1986 ) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, where he also directs its Graduate Fellows Program and teaches in its Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Program. His current research interests include political elites; methods for analyzing biographical information; homelessness and homeless policymaking; and the importance of time and change in explaining political phenomena. At present, his research on political elites analyzes how changes in elite recruitment structures shaped and were formed by the development of the U.S. national state. His research on homelessness addresses the problematic logic of homeless prevention and the dynamics of homelessness. And he is carrying out a study that compares the utility of different statistical methods for incorporating the trajectories of individuals' biographies in social science research. This work currently focuses on the impact of social interventions, particularly those for homeless people. He is also developing a project to study the sources of the increased criminalization and militarization of U.S. society since World War II.

• Warren Mitofsky, In Memoriam  Warren Mitofsky (1934 - 2006) was a well-regarded American pollster credited with the invention of the exit poll.  Mitofsky graduated in 1957 from Guilford College and was executive director of the CBS News election and survey unit from 1967 to 1990. He also previously served as an executive producer of CBS election night broadcasts.  Prior to CBS, Mitofsky worked with the Census Bureau where he designed a number of surveys. Along with Joseph Waksberg, Mitofsky is credited with developing an efficient method of sampling telephone numbers using random digit dialing, which has since been widely adopted as a sampling method. In 1999, the American Association for Public Opinion Research presented him with its lifetime achievement award for his "continuing concern for survey quality". 

• Christopher Weiss (Sociology), Director of QMSS  Lecturer and Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Program Director Weiss’ (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania 1999) primary research interests center on the influence of organizations and institutions on children and adolescents. His recent published work has focused on understanding how organizational features of schools shape student outcomes and on how parental education in later life influences intergenerational educational patterns. With Jennifer Hill, he is using new statistical tools to examine the effect of grade retention on student outcomes. Chris also participates in the Health and Society Scholars working group on physical activity and obesity, and is involved in Andrew Rundle's NIH-funded project on the built environment, physical activity, and body size.

School of International and Public Affairs

• Bogdan Vasi  Assistant Professor Vasi (Ph.D., Cornell University, 2005) is assistant professor at SIPA and the Department of Sociology. He teaches courses in quantitative research methods, consumerism, collective action, and social movements. His present research focuses on the adoption and implementation of local programs to address global climate change, the development of the wind energy industry, and on strategies for coping with tragedies of the commons.  His recent publications include The New Anti-War Protests and Miscible Mobilizations" in Social Movement Studies (2005), "The Fist of the Working Class: The Social Movements of Jiu Valley Miners in Post-Socialist Romania" in East European Politics and Societies (2004), and "The Mobilizer's Dilemma: Crisis, Empowerment, and Collective Action," with Michael Macy in Social Forces (2003). 

School of Social Work

• Julien Teitler Associate Professor Teitler (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1996) is Associate Professor of Social Work and Sociology and the Director of the Columbia University Social Indicators Survey Center. Teitler’sresearch focuses on the effects of social environments and policies on families and children, on health disparities, and on research methodology. Teitler teaches classes in Human Behavior and the Social Environment and in Research Methodology.  Her other scholarly interests include family demography, social inequality and research methods; adolescent transitions, effects of parent behaviors on children, social inequality, family policy, and welfare reform.

• Andrew Gelman (Statistics)  Professor Gelman (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1990)  is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis, Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks, and, most recently, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do. Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City, the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that your vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in your basement; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.

Teachers College

• Douglas Ready, Faculty Affiliate  Ready (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2004) is Sociologist of Education whose  research examines the influence of educational policies and practices on educational equity and access. Two strands comprise this work. The first focuses on high school reform in general, and the small-schools movement in particular. His second research strand employs large nationally-representative datasets and growth curve modeling within HLM frameworks to examine race and social class disparities in young children's cognitive growth.