SPEAKERS

Jon Radoff is an American entrepreneur, author and game designer. His work has focused on online communities, Internet media and computer games. He is CEO and co-founder of Beamable, a Live Game services platform that enables the creation of online games based on Unity. He spent time at Harvard University studying Cognitive Neuroscience and acting as a teaching Fellow.

Dr. Pierce Ekstrom is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He studies how psychological individual differences give rise to diverse political preferences, how individuals’ moral values and politicized identities create outright conflict from these differences of opinion, and the desirable and undesirable effects of political disagreement.

Harvey Michaels, an MIT alumnus now at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and lecturing at the MIT Sloan School of Management, researches energy management and efficiency and smart-grid-related opportunities to mitigate climate change. He is a member of Future of the Grid at the MIT Energy Initiative, Efficiency Forward at the Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and Project Faculty for Energy Democracy at the MIT Media Lab. Prior to joining MIT, Harvey Michaels worked at energy efficiency companies Xenergy and Aclara Software.

Jackie Gantzer joined the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2019 and took on the role of Director of Remote Learning this past April. In this capacity, she has played a leading role coordinating and implementing the state’s pandemic response for K-12 schools. Jackie began her career as a middle school ELA teacher, and has since spent time as a school administrator, serving in the Indianapolis Mayor’s Office of Education Innovation, working for an education nonprofit, and as an education consultant supporting organizations with talent, planning, and development strategy.

Prof. Noelle Selin is Associate Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. She also serves as the Director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. Her research uses modeling and analysis to inform sustainability decision-making, focusing on issues involving air pollution, climate change and hazardous substances such as mercury.

Dr. Matthew Fiedler is a fellow with the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy. His research examines a range of topics in health care economics and health care policy.Prior to joining the Brookings Institution in January 2017, Fiedler served as Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers, where he oversaw the Council’s work on health care policy, including implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance expansions and health care delivery system reforms. Find his full bio here.

Dr. Elaine C. Kamarck is a Senior Fellow in the Governance Studies program and Director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. She focuses her research on the presidential nomination system and American politics. Kamarck is also a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Find her full bio here.

Dr. Xiaoyu Pu is an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a Public Intellectuals Program fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations and a non-resident senior fellow with the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Pu is the author of Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order (The Studies in Asian Security Series, Stanford University Press, 2019). Read his full bio here

Dr. Sergey Paltsev is a Deputy Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and a Senior Research Scientist at MIT Energy Initiative and MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA.

He is the lead modeler in charge of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model of the world economy.

His research covers a wide range of topics including energy economics, climate policy, taxation, advanced energy technologies, and international trade. Sergey is an Advisory Board Member for the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Consortium and a Member of the Economy-Wide Modeling Panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Science Advisory Board. Dr. Paltsev is an author of more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals and books.

Louise Sheiner is the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. She had served as an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System since 1993, most recently as the senior economist in the Fiscal Analysis Section for the Research and Statistics Division. In her time at the Fed, she was also appointed deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1996), and served as senior staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (1995-96). Before joining the Fed, Sheiner was an economist at the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Sheiner pursues research on health spending and other fiscal issues. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, as well as an undergraduate degree in biology at Harvard.

Dick Simpson is a professor of political science at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he has taught for over 50 years. In addition to his distinguished academic career at UIC, where he has received four of the highest awards for teaching, Professor Simpson has served as an consultant and elected official within local government. In 1971 Simpson was elected alderman in Chicago’s 44th ward, where he served out two terms and consistently introduced and voted for reform legislation. In addition to serving as an advisor to campaigns from alderman to president, Professor Simpson has served on the transition teams of three Chicago mayors─Jane Byrne in 1979, Harold Washington on 1983, and most recently, Lori Lightfoot this year.

Professor Simpson has published over twenty books on elections, elected officials, city government, budgeting, and public policy, including The Good Fight: Life Lessons from a Chicago Progressive, Winning Elections in the 21st Century, The Politics of Compassion and Transformation, and Twenty-First Century Chicago. He has produced seven films and video documentaries and has published more than 100 professional journal articles, magazine articles, book chapters, and book reviews.

Claire Boine is a Research Scholar at Boston University where she focuses on gun culture. She looks into the social identities constructed around gun ownership and how they tie into the political debate on firearm policies. With a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and other degrees in international law and conflict analysis, she has a multicultural pluri-disciplinary approach to solving complex problems. Her past research includes framing analysis of human trafficking in the US and France, study of legal and social norms around torture and monitoring and evaluation of several nonprofit programs in child protection and access to rights.

 Kim Napoli is a Roxbury, Massachusetts-based attorney practicing labor and employment law. In 2006 she co-founded the Hempest in Harvard Square (now The Hempest, Inc.), a hemp-based retail boutique whose mission is to educate the public about hemp and cannabis. She is Director of Diversity Programs and Marketing Specialist at New England Treatment Access, Inc., and is Of Counsel to the Vicente Sederberg law firm. In recognition of her expertise on minority business development, Governor Charlie Baker appointed Napoli to serve on the Massachusetts Cannabis Advisory Board.

Emma Chasen co-owns and operates Eminent Consulting, a cannabis consulting business that offers educational training programs for cannabis industry professionals and lay enthusiasts. After graduating from Brown University in 2014 with a degree in Medicinal Plant Research, she became General Manager then Director of Education for Farma, developing curriculum focused on cannabis science, product knowledge and empathetic patient care. Renowed for her ability explain scientific concepts around cannabis in a way that is accessible and helpful to the general public, Emma has been featured in Newsweek, High Times Magazine, The Oregon Leaf , Teen Vogue, Galore, Forbes and many more publications.

Jed Willard is Director of Global Engagement at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foundation at Harvard. In this role, he leads the Foundation’s mission to pursue solutions to current challenges with an eye both to their historical origins and to FDR’s personal legacy. Over the past decade, Willard has worked with governments to help them to understand the drivers of public opinion and create strategies and structures to effectively engage citizens. He is currently focused on adaptation to climate change, coping with disinformation and propaganda, and revitalizing faith in liberal democracy. Willard co-founded the Public Diplomacy Collaborative at Harvard Kennedy School.

Jake completed his doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley in 2014, with a dissertation entitled “‘We Just Built It:’ Code Enforcement, Local Politics, and the Informal Housing Market in Southeast Los Angeles County.” His research lies at the nexus of housing, real estate development, and planning. He has published research on the racialized restructuring of metropolitan space, microhousing infill, and the measurement of affordable rental housing cost efficiency in Urban Geography, Journal of Urbanism, and Housing Policy Debate.

Ms. Laur Hesse Fisher is the founder and Board Chair of Civic Series. Passionate about issue literacy and productive civic dialogue, she founded Civic Series in 2014 to increase our ability to understand and talk about complex current events and political issues, no matter our political affiliation. By day, she works for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, where she works to expand MIT’s public engagement on climate change across political lines.

Catharine Wang. Dr. Wang is an Associate Professor in the Community Health Sciences Department, and a Peter T. Paul Career Development Professor, at Boston University. She obtained her doctorate in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan and has expertise in survey research methods, intervention development, and program evaluation. Her research has spanned across several areas including public health genomics, health communication/e-health, health literacy, and cancer prevention and control. Dr. Wang currently serves as a member of the National Cancer Institute’s PDQ Cancer Genetics Editorial Board. Much of Dr. Wang’s work focuses on the effective translation of genomic discoveries into clinical and public health practice. She has been the Principal Investigator on several grants to examine how people understand and use complex risk information to make health decisions. Her work also examines how individuals adopt new health technologies, including genomics and molecular diagnostics, and examines barriers to the adoption and implementation of these technologies among underserved patient populations. With a grant from NHGRI, she is currently collaborating with clinicians and computer scientists at Boston Medical Center and Northeastern University to create a “virtual counselor” to ascertain family health history in efforts to overcome previously identified literacy-related barriers to using computerized tools and facilitate the use of family history a vehicle for precision medicine. Another NHGRI grant is examining the adoption of prenatal cell-free fetal DNA testing in diverse patient populations in efforts to identify and address potential inequities in use.

Sharmila Chatterjee. Senior Lecturer in Marketing and the Academic Head for the MBA Track in Enterprise Management (EM) at MIT Sloan. Chatterjee teaches the graduate course in B2B Marketing and is deeply engaged in Action Learning as a faculty mentor for G-Lab, China/India Lab, and as an instructor for the Enterprise Management (EM) Lab. Her research explores sales-marketing interface [what is this in lay person language? ☺ ], customer acquisition and retention, the diffusion of technological innovations, value based management, brand trust, financial literacy and multicultural marketing. Chatterjee has published in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, among others [pick top 3 favorites?], and is an award winning case writer. Chatterjee graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani and worked briefly in Faridabad, India before earning her Ph.D. in Marketing from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Matthew Ciborowski. Senior Planner in Arup’s Boston office with 10 years of experience in the public and private sectors. His work to date has focused on the Boston area through positions with the state department of transportation (MassDOT) and transit authority (MBTA), and he has worked across the United States in previous roles.

Matthew’s experience includes service planning, alternatives analysis, economic development, environmental review, and the integration of engineering services. He has extensive project management experience, having managed multi-million-dollar planning studies and P3 efforts, most of which are now in the implementation phase.

As the leader of Arup’s Boston Planning practice, Matthew delivers projects for public and private sector clients that shape the future of our cities. His key areas of focus include fare and pricing policy, passenger facility design, transit micro-investments, the integration of emerging technologies into existing networks, the interface between planning and engineering, bridging the gap between government regimes, and P3 financing strategy.

Stefanie Coxe. The founder of Nexus Werx and an activism trainer and political consultant who worked as a “political insider” for nearly 15 years, including serving as an aide to two Massachusetts state representatives and a Member of Congress. She kept meeting people who couldn’t afford a lobbyist – non-profit leaders, town administrators, and community activists – but earnestly wanted to learn how to navigate the world of politics and effectively advocate for their priorities. She has created the Learn to Lobby series to do just that.

Rebecca Wolfson. The Executive Director of the Boston Cyclist’s Union. She works with residents, advocates, municipal staff and policymakers to help transform the region’s streets so everyone can feel safe and comfortable riding a bike as transportation. Her experience liaising in local government and community, environmental ethic, and grassroots organizing skills were honed in the six years she spent on Cape Cod working for Barnstable County’s Resource Development Office and environmental AmeriCorps program.