Boosting Grant Applications from Faculty at MSIs - Mentor-Mentee Pairs

Theresa Kuchler is an Associate Professor of Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Her research interests are in the areas of household, behavioral, and real estate finance, and social networks, often involving large micro datasets. Her recent research leverages online data to analyze why consumers hold expensive credit card balances, often over substantial time horizons.

Sourik Banerjee is Assistant Professor of Economics at California State University Stanislaus. His research interests are in the areas of financial economics, behavioral economics, and experimental economics. He is particularly interested in studying the determinants of financial market behavior of retail investors, and designing and testing interventions that might positively influence the behavior of historically underrepresented groups in the financial market.

Jeremy C. Stein is the Moise Y. Safra Professor of Economics at Harvard University and serves on the board of directors of the Harvard Management Company. Professor Stein’s research has covered topics including behavioral finance and market efficiency, corporate investment and financing decisions, risk management, capital allocation inside firms, banking, financial regulation, and monetary policy.

Isaac Marcelin is Finance Professor and Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. His research highlights the relationship between financial and political institutions, public policy, natural disasters, and the economics of climate change.

Stefania Albanesi is a Professor of Economics at the Miami Herbert School of Business at the University of Miami. Professor Albanesi’s research topics have included the political economy of inflation, the optimal taxation of capital and labor income, and the evolution of gender disparities in labor market outcomes. Her recent work has studied the distribution of debt and defaults in the lead-up to and during the 2007–09 financial crisis, and the determinants and consequences of personal bankruptcy.

Miesha Williams is Vice Chair and Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Spelman College. Her research focuses on disparate economic outcomes across races in the United States, as well as on macroeconomic policies in Africa. One of her current research projects studies racial disparities in cognitive decline.

Tatyana Deryugina is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Deryugina’s research interests lie broadly in environmental, public, and behavioral economics. In recent work, she has studied the fiscal consequences of natural disasters and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on female relative to male academics.

Xi Yang is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of North Texas. Her research interests lie in labor economics and urban economics, with a focus on urban and housing policies and their impacts on labor market outcomes, gender and racial inequality, fertility and marriage, and household financial well-being.

Anna Aizer is the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University. She is a Research Associate at NBER and Co-Director of the NBER's program on Children, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Human Resources. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being. Her current work considers the mechanisms behind the intergenerational transmission of poverty. In particular, she focuses on the roles played by health insurance and access to medical care, domestic violence, exposure to environmental toxins, the role of stress, and poor children's greater interaction with the juvenile justice system.

Rebecca Sen Choudhury is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Spelman College. She is an applied microeconomist. Her primary research interest lies in the area of health economics, specifically economics of risky health behaviors -- addiction, obesity and mental health.

Matthew E. Kahn is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California and a Research Associate at NBER. His research focuses on urban and environmental and energy economics topics.

Abdullah Khan is an associate professor of economics at the School of Business of Claflin University. His research interests include urban and regional economics, development economics and public economics. He is particularly interested in studying the determinants and interlinkage of employment agglomeration, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and innovation networks.

Dr. Kalena Cortes is the Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professor in the Department of Public Service and Administration at Texas A&M University’s Bush School. She is the inaugural Director of the Bush School’s Program in Education Policy. Most recently, she was named Texas A&M’s 2020 Presidential Impact Fellow and 2021 Chancellor Enhancing Development and Generating Excellence in Scholarship (EDGES) Fellow. Dr. Cortes' interest is in the economics of education. Her research focuses on issues of equity and access, in particular, identifying educational policies that help disadvantaged students at the PK-12 and postsecondary levels.

Oluwagbemiga (‘Gbenga) Ojumu, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Prairie View A&M University, Prairie View, Texas. He is an Applied Economist and his research interests include International Trade Policies, Global Entrepreneurship, and Applied Microeconomics.

Kala Krishna is an Indian - American economist, currently Liberal Arts Research Professor of Economics at The Pennsylvania State University. She is an NBER Research Associate and a CESifo Research Network Fellow. Her research is in the areas of International Trade, the Economics of Education, Development Economics and Industrial Organization.

Belinda Román is Associate Professor of Economics for St. Mary’s University. She is director of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) Certificate Program, Collaborative for the Economic Analysis of Borders (CfEAB), and Co-Organizer of the Texas Latino Policy Symposium (TXLPS). Dr. Román is the first woman to serve as president of the San Antonio Business and Economics Society (SABES), an affiliate of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). Her research interests include the economics of cross-border economies, and the impact of local and cross-border economic development policies on race, gender, and ethnicity. Her methodological approach is interdisciplinary and includes network analysis and agent-based modelling of micro behaviors and aggregate outcomes.

Isaiah Andrews is the George Fisher Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a co-editor at the American Economic Review. He specializes in econometrics, and his research focuses on developing methods for inference that are robust to common problems in empirical work, including insufficiently informative data (weak identification) and model misspecification. He received a MacArthur fellowship in 2020 and the John Bates Clark Medal in 2021.

Eduardo Zambrano is Professor of Economics and Academic Director, MS in Quantitative Economics, Department of Economics, at Cal Poly. His research centers on microeconomic theory, with particular emphasis on welfare economics and the measurement of multidimensional inequality and well-being.