ISERP Executive Committee

  • Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government

    Robert Y. Shapiro (Ph.D., Chicago, 1982) is a professor and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and he served as acting director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) during 2008-2009. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2012 and in 2010 the Outstanding Achievement Award of the New York Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (NYAAPOR). He specializes in American politics with research and teaching interests in public opinion, policymaking, political leadership, the mass media, and applications of statistical methods. He has taught at Columbia since 1982 after receiving his degree and serving as a study director at the National Opinion Research Center (University of Chicago).

  • Professor of Political Science

    Robert Erikson (Ph.D., Illinois, 1969) specializes in American political behavior, elections, quantitative methodology, and statistics.

  • Giddings Professor of Sociology

    Thomas A. DiPrete is Giddings Professor of Sociology, co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP), co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University, and a faculty member of the Columbia Population Research Center. DiPrete holds a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Duke University, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison as well as Columbia. DiPrete’s research interests include social stratification, demography, education, economic sociology, and quantitative methodology. A specialist in comparative research, DiPrete has held research appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Social Science Research Center – Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the University of Amsterdam. His recent and ongoing projects include the study of gender differences in educational performance, educational attainment, and fields of study, the determinants of college persistence and dropout in the U.S., a comparative study of how educational expansion and the structure of linkages between education and the labor market contribute to earnings inequality in several industrialized countries, and the study of how social comparison processes affect the compensation of corporate executives.

  • Professor of History and Co-Director of ISERP

    Matthew Connelly, associate professor, works on the history of eugenics, migration, and birth control. His most recent book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, has just been published by Harvard University Press. His research articles have appeared in such journals as Population and Development Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, Journal of Global History, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly and The National Interest. He received his B.A. from Columbia(1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1997).

  • Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs; Dean of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

    Miguel Urquiola is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he also chairs the Columbia Committee on the Economics of Education. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Development Economics (BREAD).

    Urquiola’s research is on the Economics of Education, with a focus on understanding how schools and universities compete, and how they form reputations for quality. It also covers how parents and students select educational providers, and the consequences such choices have on sorting and labor market outcomes.

    His past appointments include: Vice Dean at the School of International and Public Affairs (Columbia), Co-editor at the Journal of Human Resources, Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, Assistant Professor of Economics at Cornell, Young Professional at the World Bank, and Assistant Professor at the Bolivian Catholic University.

  • ISERP Co-Director
    Professor of Economics and Political Science

    Alessandra Casella is professor of Economics at Columbia University and a fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), and the Center for Economic Policy Research (London). She received her PhD in Economics from MIT in 1989, taught at UC Berkeley before moving to Columbia in 1993, and held the position of Directeur d’ Etudes (temps partiel) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Sciences Sociales (EHESS) (Paris and Marseilles) from 1996 to 2010. Her main research interests are political economy, public economics, and experimental economics. Casella has been the recipient of numerous fellowships: she has been a Guggenheim fellow, a member of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, a Russell Sage fellow, and a Straus fellow at the NYU Law School. Her book "Storable Votes. Protecting the Minority Voice" was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Casella is Director of the Columbia Laboratory for the Social Sciences.

  • Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
    Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS)

    Mabel O. Wilson (’91 M.Arch) is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. At GSAPP she co-directs the Global Africa Lab. Wilson joined the faculty of Columbia in 2007 and she has held fulltime and visiting appointments at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Princeton University, Ohio State University and the University of Kentucky. She is trained in Architecture and American Studies, two fields that inform her scholarship, curatorial projects, art works and design projects. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Her research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film.

  • Loubat Professor of American Archaeology
    Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Interdepartmental Program in Archaeology

    Terence N. D’Altroy is the Loubat Professor of American Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and the founding director of the Columbia Center for Archaeology. In 2016, he received the Columbia University Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. His research interests lie in politics, economics, and knowledge systems. He is particularly interested in the comparative study of empires, especially the Incas of Andean South America, with a focus on the organization and thinking underpinning their rule. Since 1969, he has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. He has written or (co)edited several books, including The Incas (2014, 2d ed.), The Incas: Inside an American Empire (2004), Empire and Domestic Economy (2002), Empires (2002), and Provincial Power in the Inka Empire (1992), in addition to numerous scholarly papers.

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