ISERP Executive Committee

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.

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.

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.