Chengxin (Michael) Xu is an associate professor of the Department of Public Affairs and Nonprofit Leadership at Seattle University. Chengxin got his PhD from the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University-Newark. He researches topics of public administration and nonprofit management. His recent research focuses on the equity of public service delivery, public engagement, and resource allocation. As an experimentalist, his studies draw on insights from theories of organizational behavior, social psychology and behavioral science.

Chengxin’s work appears in leading journals of the field, including Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Voluntas, and Policy Studies Journal.  

Chengxin teaches Foundations of Public Administration (5010), Research Design (5430), Economic Analysis (5100), and Capstone (5900) at the MPA program. His teaching philosophy holds strongly that the goal of public and nonprofit administration education is to confront the inequities embedded within current institutions and to cultivate a shared commitment to the sacred work of public service.

Gordon Abner is an Associate Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He received a Joint PhD in Public Policy from Indiana University-Bloomington. His primary research interests are in the areas of employee morale and organizational performance in the public sector broadly, as well as in policing specifically. His work has been published in scholarly outlets such as Public Administration Review, the Review of Public Personnel Administration, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Public Performance and Management Review. His work has also been covered in popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Government Executive, FEDweek, and the Federal Times. His work has been funded by organizations such as the IBM Center for the Business of Government, the American Political Science Association, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

Matthew J. Notowidigdo studies a broad set of topics in labor economics and health economics. In labor economics, his research has focused on understanding the causes and consequences of long-term unemployment and the economic effects of unemployment insurance over the business cycle. Notowidigdo’s research in health economics focuses on the effects of public health insurance on labor supply and the effects of income on health spending. He is currently working with several state governments on large-scale randomized experiments of existing social insurance programs.

Outside of academia, Notowidigdo has corporate experience as an associate at Lehman Brothers in the Fixed Income Division, and he has consulted for several professional sports teams on ticket pricing. Within academia he has teaching experience at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and he was honored with the distinction of the Carleton E. Tucker Award for Teaching Excellence in 2004.

Notowidigdo studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining Chicago Booth in 2010 as an Assistant Professor. In 2014, he joined the Department of Economics at Northwestern University as Associate Professor of Economics. In 2020, Notowidigo returned to Booth as Professor of Economics. He holds a BS in economics, a BS in computer engineering, a MEng in computer science, and a PhD in economics. He is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, an Associate Editor at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and a member of the Board of Editors at American Economic Journal -- Economic Policy.

Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist who studies education and social policy issues, is the Abraham Harris Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

Jackson, who was appointed to the White House Council of Economic Advisors in August 2023, has analyzed several important aspects of education policy, including the importance of public school funding on student outcomes through adulthood, the effects of college-preparatory programs on students’ college and labor market outcomes, the effects of educational tracking on students’ academic achievement, and how single-sex education can impact students’ academic performance.

However, the bulk of Jackson’s work has focused on better understanding teacher labor markets. Jackson’s extensive work on teachers analyzes the role of peer learning in teacher effectiveness, how student demographics directly affect the distribution of teacher quality across schools, how a teacher’s effectiveness depends on the schooling context within which they operate, how best to measure teacher quality and other related topics.

Since 2016, Jackson has been listed among the top university-based scholars who are doing the most to influence educational policy and practice by Education Week. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and other organizations.

In 2022, Jackson was appointed lead editor for the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, one of the nation’s most respected scholarly economic journals. He serves on the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession at the American Economic Association and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

Jackson’s scholarly articles have appeared in leading economics journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Journal, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. His research has been featured in a number of mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University in 1998 and his doctorate in economics from Harvard University in 2007. He was assistant professor in the department of labor economics at Cornell University between 2007 and 2010 and then moved to Northwestern where he subsequently earned tenure in 2012. He was promoted to full professor in 2017.

Beth Schueler is an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University. She studies education policy, politics, and governance. Her goal is to understand the political dimensions of educational policymaking to help policymakers and practitioners improve school systems and better serve students. Much of her work has focused on efforts to improve U.S. K-12 schools and districts that have been labelled low-performing. She uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods, often in partnership with state and local educational agencies, to study topics including accountability policy, school and district turnaround, state takeovers of school districts, school board governance, public opinion, (de)centralization, education leadership, individualized instruction, the development of civic competencies, and more. Prior to Stanford, she was on the faculty at the University of Virginia and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Gennetian is an applied economist whose research straddles a variety of areas concerning child poverty from income security and stability to early care and education with a particular lens toward identifying causal mechanisms underlying how child poverty shapes children’s development. She is a co-PI on the first multi-site multi-year randomized control study of a monthly unconditional cash transfer to low income mothers of infants in the U.S. called Baby’s First Years. Her recent work bridges poverty scholarship with a behavioral economic framework.  “The Persistence of Poverty in the Context of Economic Instability: A Behavioral Perspective,” describes such a framework for poverty programs and policy, co-authored with Dr. Eldar Shafir and her co-authored publication “Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science,” further advances the application of behavioral economic insights to the arena of children’s development. Professor Gennetian has since launched the beELL initiative; applying insights from behavioral economics to design strategies to support parent and family engagement in, and enhance the impacts of, existing childhood interventions. Dr. Gennetian also has a body of research examining poverty among Hispanic children and families, serving as a PI on several grants and a co-PI directing work on poverty and economic self-sufficiency at the National Center for Research on Hispanic Families.