Current Faculty Fellows and Research Affiliates

As a research affiliate, Michael Bernstein is co-leading the Center’s Ethics and Society Review project. He is an associate professor of computer science and STMicroelectronics faculty scholar at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Group. His research focuses on the design of social computing systems. This research has won best paper awards at top conferences in human-computer interaction, including CHI, CSCW, ICWSM, and UIST, and has been reported in venues such as The New York Times, New Scientist, Wired, and The Guardian. Michael has been recognized with an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, UIST Lasting Impact Award, and the Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Prize. He holds a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree and a PhD in computer science from MIT. Bernstein was a CASBS fellow in 2021-22.

As a research affiliate in 2021-22, Jake Bowers will continue working on the CASBS Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (CISIL). CISIL aims to improve causal evaluation of public policies. Bowers is an associate professor of political science and statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a fellow with the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, a fellow with the Office of Evaluation Sciences, and a senior scientist with the Brown Policy Lab. He is methods director for the Evidence in Government and Politics network and co-founder of Research4Impact. His research in applied statistics and political methodology focuses on questions about statistical inference for causal effects in both randomized field experiments and observational studies. Bowers was a CASBS fellow in 2018-19 and a research affiliate since 2017-18. Visit the following website for more information about his work: http://jakebowers.org

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus (active) at Stanford Law School, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, faculty director of the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and co-director of the Stanford Law and Policy Lab. He was president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2000 to 2012.

He is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (Stanford University Press, 2018, 2nd ed.), Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2010), and articles on constitutional law, philanthropy, and impact investing. His current courses include Problem Solving for Public Policy and Social Change and Advanced Topics in Philanthropy and Impact Investing. He created the online interactive course, Essentials of Nonprofit Strategy, on Stanford’s Lagunita platform and is the instructor in an online course, Essentials of Nonprofit Strategy, offered by Philanthropy University.

Brest is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary degrees from Northwestern University School of Law and Swarthmore College. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, he clerked for Judge Bailey Aldrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice John M. Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court, and did civil rights litigation with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Mississippi. He was a fellow in 1983-84, and has been a faculty fellow since 2018-19.

During her year as research affiliate, Carrie Cihak will continue to co-lead CASBS’s Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (CISIL) with research affiliate Jake Bowers, thereby advancing evidence-informed policymaking practices that support sustained and meaningful collaboration between academic researchers and policymakers, including between Stanford University and King County.

Cihak leads evidence-informed practice and partnerships for the regional government of the 12th largest county in the United States. Cihak guides County agencies on community outcomes and impact, with a strong focus on advancing racial equity. Former roles at the County include three years leading learning and evidence practice and partnerships at King County Metro Transit; serving as an inaugural member of the community mitigation team in the County’s pandemic response; and eight years as Chief of Policy for the King County Executive with responsibility for identifying the highest priority policy areas and community outcomes for leadership focus and developing and launching innovative solutions to complex, controversial, and cross-sector issues. Cihak is trained as a PhD-level (ABD) economist and served as staff economist on international trade and finance for President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. She is a Local Government Fellow and serves on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Standards of Excellence at Results for America, a non-profit organization that supports all levels of government in making the use of data and evidence in decision making the “new normal”. She is a member at large of the board of the Society for Causal Inference. Cihak was the first government Policy Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS) in 2017-18 and has been a Research Affiliate at CASBS since that time.

Estelle Freedman’s current research project expands upon the legal approach in her book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press, 2013), by exploring digitized oral history collections as sources for understanding personal narratives of assault, rape, and harassment in the twentieth-century U.S. She is working on methodological and historical essays interpreting sexual memories, sexual silences, and the changing language of sexual trauma across diverse groups of narrators. Freedman’s past scholarship has focused on the histories of women, sexuality, feminism, and social movements. In addition to two books on the history of women’s prison reform in the U.S., she is the author of No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine Books, 2002) and the co-author (with John D'Emilio) of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (3rd edition, University of Chicago Press, 2012), and the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader (Modern Library, 2007). She earned her BA at Barnard College, and MA and PhD degrees in U.S. History at Columbia University. Freedman holds the Edgar E. Robinson chair (Emerit) in U.S. History at Stanford, where she co-founded the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has been a CASBS faculty fellow since 2019-20, participating as a member in the CASBS project “Addressing Sexual Violence Through Institutional Courage,” and was a fellow at CASBS in 2009-10 and 2018-19. For more information, you can find her CV at https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=55788&name=Estelle_Freedman

Robert Gibbons is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and professor in MIT’s department of economics. His research and teaching concern the design and performance of organized activities, especially “relational contracts” (informal agreements so rooted in the parties’ circumstances that they cannot be adjudicated by courts). Organized activities may occur not only within firms, but also between firms (e.g. supply relationships, alliances, joint ventures) or beyond firms (e.g. hospitals, schools, government agencies). Since 2002, Gibbons has been co-principal investigator of MIT Sloan’s Program on Innovation in Markets and Organizations and founding director of the working group in organizational economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was co-editor (with John Roberts) of The Handbook of Organizational Economics (Princeton University Press, 2013) and a board member of the Citicorp Behavioral Science Research Council (1994-2000) and of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2000-06). During 2016-19, Gibbons and Woody Powell (Stanford University) co-ran a sequence of summer institutes at CASBS on organizations and their effectiveness. During Covid, they held virtual convocations integrating these four cohorts of summer scholars. In 2021-22, they will engage interested fellows with summer scholars who return for short stints at CASBS. Gibbons is a research affiliate and was a CASBS fellow in 1994-95 and 2014-15.

Steven Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, is associate dean for clinical and translational research and professor of epidemiology & population health and of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He directs the Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility (SPORR), a program to teach and incentivize the adoption of best scientific practices throughout the Stanford School of Medicine. He is co-founder and co-director of the Meta-research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), a group dedicated to studying and improving the reproducibility and efficiency of biomedical research. He also leads a variety of training programs in epidemiology and clinical research. His research area is in scientific and statistical inference, medical epistemology and their connections with research ethics and policy. Outside of Stanford, Goodman serves as chair of the PCORI Methodology Committee, senior statistical editor at the Annals of Internal Medicine, and is scientific advisor to the national Blue Cross-Blue Shield technology assessment program. He has participated in over a dozen committees and workshops of the National Academies of Science. He was awarded the 2016 Spinoza Chair in Medicine from the University of Amsterdam for his work in inference, the 2019 Lilienfeld award from the American College of Epidemiology for his lifetime contributions to the field of epidemiology, and in 2020 was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He studied mathematics and biochemistry at Harvard, received his MD from NYU, trained in pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, and received a masters in biostatistics and PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Goodman has been a faculty fellow since 2021-22. In his non-academic life, Steve is a singer, of opera, national anthems and political satire, and a tennis player (4.0). He welcomes connecting with CASBS fellows in relation to any of those pursuits. For more about him, visit https://profiles.stanford.edu/steven-goodman.

As a faculty fellow in 2021-22, Deborah M. Gordon will join the CASBS program “Humans, Nature, and Machines.” Gordon’s research is on collective behavior in ant colonies and other natural systems that operate without central control, using local interactions among participants to allow groups to respond to changing conditions. An ecological perspective on collective behavior examines how collective behavior adjusts to changing environments. Ant colonies function collectively, and the enormous diversity of more than 14K species of ants, in different habitats, provides opportunities to look for general ecological patterns in the evolution of collective behavior. Gordon’s long-term study of the demography and behavior of a population of colonies in New Mexico shows how natural selection is shaping the collective behavior that regulates foraging in response to water stress. Gordon is professor of biology at Stanford University. She is the author of Ants at Work (2000, W. W. Norton & Company), and Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010, Princeton University Press, Primers in Complex Systems), both written during fellowships at CASBS, and a forthcoming book, The Ecology of Collective Behavior (Princeton University Press). Gordon was a CASBS fellow in 1997-98, 2001-02, and 2009-10. For more information, please visit her lab website: http://www.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/

David Grusky’s research addresses the changing structure of late-industrial inequality and takes on such topics as the role of market failure in explaining income inequality, recent trends in economic and social mobility, the surprising persistence of extreme gender inequality, and new ways to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring poverty, inequality, and mobility.
At Stanford University, Grusky is the Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, professor of sociology, senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, faculty fellow of the Center for Population Health Sciences, director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and coeditor of Pathways Magazine. Grusky is a former CASBS fellow (class of 1991-92) and has been a faculty fellow since 2017-18.

During his year as a research affiliate, James Guszcza plans to write a book on the philosophical foundations of human-centered artificial intelligence, drawing on ideas from psychology, human-centered design, collective intelligence, and ethics. The motivating idea is that enjoying the promise of AI while avoiding its many well-publicized pitfalls will require a foundation for AI that extends beyond computer science and machine learning to encompass various types of human factors.

Guszcza has worked as data scientist for two decades and is the first person to be designated Deloitte’s U.S. Chief Data Scientist. The creation of hybrid human-machine systems has been a recurring theme in his work. In recent years, he has applied behavioral nudge techniques to more ethically and effectively operationalize machine learning algorithms. Guszcza is a former professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison business school and holds a PhD in philosophy from The University of Chicago. He serves on the scientific advisory board of the Psychology of Technology Institute. Guszcza was a CASBS fellow in 2020-21.

Daniel E. Ho is the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, professor of political science, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab). Ho serves on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Commission (NAIAC), advising the White House on artificial intelligence, and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). He received his JD from Yale Law School and PhD from Harvard University and clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Ho has been a faculty fellow at CASBS since 2017-18.

Saumitra Jha does research on economic, financial and organizational approaches to mitigating political polarization and violent conflict. An economist by training, his work combines formal theory, qualitative fieldwork, natural experiments in history and contemporary field experiments. He is currently working on three research themes. These include examining how financial innovations and trading opportunities mitigate or exacerbate conflict; how the strategy of nonviolent protest works and why it often also fails; and studying how networks of influential individuals, forged from war-time experiences, can undermine or rebuild democratic freedoms. Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in both economics and political science, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best-published article in political economy from the American Political Science Association and his co-authored work on heroic networks received the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Jha was also honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellows Program. He was a fellow in 2020-21 and is a current faculty fellow, participating in the Center’s Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab. For more information, please visit his website: https://saumitra.people.stanford.edu/

James Holland Jones is an associate professor of Earth System Science and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Originally trained as an anthropologist, he has additional training and expertise in demography, statistics, and epidemiology. Jones works on a variety of projects relating to human adaptability and decision-making, including the analysis of livelihood-related responses to climate change, the role of dynamic exchange networks in managing environmental risks among subsistence populations, the reconstruction of prehistoric demographic patterns and how these inform debates about climate-mediated collapse, the coupled dynamics of behavior-change and disease transmission, and the impact of structural racism on epidemic outcomes. Jones also has a broad interest in the intersection of evolutionary and economic theory, which served as the foundation for his CASBS fellowship in 2015-16. Having taken a hiatus on the book project to work on more basic science on the subject, he is back to working on The Most Rational People in the World. He teaches classes, both within Stanford Earth and for Human Biology, such as "Global Change and Emerging Infectious Disease," "Biological and Social Networks," "Demography and Life History Theory," and "Adaptation." He also teaches a freshman seminar that goes by the same name as his book project, "The Most Rational People in the World." This winter, he will co-teach one of the inaugural classes in the Doerr School of Sustainability called "Imagining Adaptive Futures," which will examine how speculative fiction can help us work toward sustainable and just futures, even in the face of potentially existential environmental threats. Along with his wife, Libra Hilde (CASBS class of 2017-18), he is a resident fellow at Castaño House. Jones is the co-leader of a new CASBS program entitled Human, Nature, and Machines. He hopes to bring not only his interest in evolving coupled-socio-ecological systems but his obsession with CliFi to this task (https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02019/jan/29/science-climate-fiction-jones-clifi). For more information, please find his website at: https://heeh.stanford.edu

Robert O. Keohane is professor of international affairs, emeritus at Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 1984/2005) and Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (Psychology Press, 2002). He is co-author (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr.) of Power and Interdependence (Pearson Higher Ed, 1977/2012), and (with Gary King and Sidney Verba) of Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton University Press, 1994). He has served as the editor of International Organization and as president of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. He won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 1989, and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, 2005. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences; he is a corresponding member of the British Academy. Keohane has been a research affiliate at CASBS since 2018-19, working on the politics of climate change. He was a fellow in 1977-78, 1987-88 and 2004-05.

Margaret Levi is professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She is a faculty fellow and former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Political Science Association. Recent books include In the Interest of Others (Princeton University Press, 2013), coauthored with John Ahlquist, and A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), coauthored with Federica Carugati. She writes about what makes for trustworthy governance and what evokes citizen compliance, consent, and dissent. As a faculty fellow, Levi will continue to co-lead the New Moral Political Economy program with CASBS program director Zachary Ugolnik. Among its spin-offs she helps manage are the Social Science of Caregiving with Alison Gopnik and the enCOREage project, whose leadership team also includes Simon Halliday (CASBS fellow 2022-23), Wendy Carlin, Roby Harrington, and Samuel Bowles. She is co-leader with Michael Bernstein, David Magnus, and Debra Satz of the Ethics and Society Review project. Levi was a fellow at CASBS in 1993-94.

Mary C. Murphy is the founding director of the first CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity (coming summer 2022). She will spend the year fundraising, developing, and implementing the Institute. The CASBS Summer Institute will engage in field building around social scientific investigation of when, how, and why difference makes a difference and will develop an on-going collaboration and support network of early career and established scholars from backgrounds underrepresented in higher education. Murphy is also completing a book, Cultures of Growth, contracted with Simon & Shuster, that describes her 10 years of research on reconstruing mindset as a cultural feature of mainstream settings such as organizational and educational settings. She shows how these organizational mindsets shape people’s motivation, engagement, behavior, and performance; companies’ and schools’ culture and organizational performance; and the diversity, equity, and inclusion of organizational and educational settings. Murphy is the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She is a co-founder of the College Transition Collaborative, a research-practice partnership housed at Stanford University dedicated to equity, growth, and belonging in higher education. In the area of organizations and tech, her research examines barriers and solutions for increasing gender and racial diversity and inclusion in STEM fields. In 2019, Murphy was awarded the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. Government. Murphy was a CASBS fellow in 2015-16 and is a research affiliate in 2021-22.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a 2017-18 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. He received a BA and MA in political science from Yale (1992); a JD from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002. Persily is a faculty fellow in 2022-23. His website is www.persily.com and Twitter handle is @persily

Despite our nation’s tumultuous racial history, Americans generally believe the country has made and continues to make steady, linear, and perhaps automatic, progress toward racial equality. During the CASBS fellowship period, Jennifer Richeson will work on a book tentatively titled, the mythology of racial progress. The goal of the book is to offer a comprehensive examination of the role that belief in, and perhaps allegiance to, this racial progress narrative plays in maintaining a profound ignorance regarding the actual state of racial inequality in our nation. Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Much of her recent research considers the political consequences of the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the United States. Richeson also investigates how people reason about and respond to different forms of inequality and the implications of such processes for detecting and confronting injustice. She is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, she was named one of 25 MacArthur “Genius” Fellows for her work “highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and in the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives,” and, in 2019 she received an honorary doctorate from Brown University for work that “expands the boundaries of knowledge on interracial interaction and the living contexts of diversity.” She is also the recipient of 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award.

Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, is the dean of the Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. She earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a doctorate in philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the ethical limits of markets; the place of equality in a just society; ethics, economics and public policy, particularly questions around education. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2004, Satz received the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford’s highest teaching honor. She was awarded the Roland Prize in 2010 for faculty volunteer service. She also co-founded the Hope House Scholars Program, which pairs volunteer faculty with undergraduates to teach liberal arts courses to residents of a drug and alcohol treatment facility for women.

Her books include Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy (with Dan Hausman and Michael McPherson, Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as several edited volumes. Her papers have been published in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Ethics, The World Bank Economic Review, and Ambio, among other journals.

Satz is a faculty fellow and member of the “Creating a New Moral Political Economy” project. She was a fellow at CASBS in 2017-18.

As a research affiliate at CASBS, Paul Smaldino will continue working on the Human, Nature and Machines program with James Holland Jones. This project involves using computational models to understand the adaptive and maladaptive nature of social learning strategies to acquire information in an uncertain and changing world. Smaldino is an associate professor of cognitive and information sciences at the University of California, Merced. He has broad interests related to cultural evolution, cooperation, and complex systems. His research involves the development and testing of mathematical and computational models to understand how behaviors emerge and evolve in response to social, cultural, and ecological pressures, as well as how those pressures themselves evolve.

You can find more information on his website: http://www.smaldino.com.

As a research affiliate at CASBS, Allison Stanger will be working on a book tentatively titled Who Elected Big Tech? She will also co-lead (with James Guszcza) the Theory of AI Practice Initiative. A general theme in her work is the impact of technological innovation on democracy’s sustainability and the blinders that our existing theoretical paradigms for thinking about global markets and national governance may have imposed on what we see and value. She is also interested in the role of free expression in both anti-racist liberal education and democratic accountability. Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, and an external professor and member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020). Stanger’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified (at the invitation of both Democrats and Republicans) before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University, where she spent academic year 2019-20 as technology and human values senior fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She was a co-author of the center’s Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience and is a senior advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. Stanger was the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress and a CASBS fellow in 2020-21.

Claude M. Steele is an American social psychologist and a professor of psychology at Stanford University. He is best known for his work on stereotype threat and its application to minority student academic performance. His earlier work dealt with research on the self (e.g., self-image, self-affirmation) as well as the role of self-regulation in addictive behaviors. In 2010, he released his book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), summarizing years of research on stereotype threat and the underperformance of minority students in higher education. Steele is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Board, the National Academy of Education, and the American Philosophical Society. He currently serves on the board of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is a fellow for both the American Institutes for Research and the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and serves on the advisory council of the MIT Media Lab. Steele has served in several major academic leadership positions as the executive vice chancellor and provost at UC Berkeley, the I. James Quillen Dean for the School of Education at Stanford University, and as the 21st provost of Columbia University. Steele was a fellow at CASBS in the class of 1994-95 and served as the director from 2005 to 2009. He has been a faculty fellow since 2019-20.

Abraham Verghese, a faculty fellow since 2017-18, launched the Stanford Presence Center to focus on the human connection in medicine. Housed within the Stanford School of Medicine, Presence seeks to add the social science dimensions to a multidisciplinary focus on balancing high touch and high tech for the equitable and inclusive experience of medicine. Their research aims include: understanding the human experience of patients, physicians and caregivers and how it relates to medical error and outcomes; and how to leverage technology for the human experience of medicine. Through collaboration with CASBS fellows, Presence explores these issues using insights from sociology, psychology, political science, organizational economics, and other disciplines that historically have honed their cutting edge at CASBS. Verghese’s career combines the roles of physician and author. His non-medical writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, the Atlantic, and other venues. His last novel Cutting for Stone (Knopf, 2009) spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His new book, The Covenant of Water, will be published the Grove Atlantic in May 2023. At Stanford’s School of Medicine, Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and vice chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the department of medicine. He is a physician trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees, and an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the American Association of Arts & Sciences. In September 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.