Current Faculty Fellows and Research Affiliates

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. A fifth cohort of scholars convened in summer 2023. Gibbons is a research affiliate and was a CASBS fellow in 1994-95 and 2014-15.

Gopi Shah Goda conducts research that informs how policy can best serve aging populations. She studies the sustainability of public programs serving the elderly, how individuals make healthcare, saving and retirement decisions as they age, and the broader implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on health, labor supply and entitlement programs. As a faculty fellow in 2023-24, Gopi will embark on research that advances understanding of the ways the tax code subsidizes health care costs, and the interplay between tax policy and insurance coverage.  

Gopi is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.  From July 2021 to July 2022, Gopi served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.  Prior to joining SIEPR in 2009, Gopi was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University.  She earned her PhD in economics from Stanford University in 2007 and her BS in mathematics and actuarial science from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln in 2000.  

For more information, visit her personal website:  https://gopi.people.stanford.edu/ 

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She is leading the CASBS project on “The Social Science of Caregiving” along with Margaret Levi and Zachary Ugolnik. She is a world leader in cognitive science, known for her work in the areas of learning and cognitive development. Gopnik is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life (Picador, 2010), and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent work is Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy, published in Daedalus (2023).

Gopnik writes the Mind and Matter science column for the Wall Street Journal, and she has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” “The Colbert Report” and “Radio Lab”. Her TED talk has been seen over 5.2 million times.  Gopnik was a CASBS fellow in 2003-04.

As a research affiliate, Simon Halliday will continue working on a new introductory economics textbook Understanding the Economy (UTE) as part of the enCOREage project. UTE builds on the work that CORE has already done with The Economy and Economy, Society, and Public Policy. The enCOREage project seeks to address the systemic failure of U.S. colleges and universities to educate our least well off and under-represented minority students. In Understanding the Economy, Halliday and collaborators will introduce content (for the most part new to introductory economics) that draws students in because the topics it addresses confront societal problems that we know interest them and builds employability skills; adopt best practices from modern learning science, which have struggled to find a home in economics instruction; and address student belonging and inclusion.

Halliday is an associate professor in the School of Economics at the University of Bristol, UK. He has co-authored (with Samuel Bowles) an intermediate-level microeconomics textbook: Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (OUP, 2022) and works in economics education, behavioral and experimental economics (in particular, on experiments to understand social preferences). He was a CASBS fellow in 2023-24. 

For more information about his work, visit simondhalliday.com

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, as Senior Advisor on Responsible AI at the U.S. Department of Labor, 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 the American Economic Review, 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 center fellow in 2020-21 and is a current faculty fellow.

For more information, please visit his website: https://saumitra.people.stanford.edu/

James Holland Jones is a professor of Environmental Behavioral Sciences in the Division of Social Sciences, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. 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 livelihood 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. A major element of his current research involves synthesizing evolutionary, ecological, and climate-science notions of adaptation. He teaches classes such as “Global Change and Emerging Infectious Disease,” “Biological and Social Networks,” “Demography and Life History Theory,” and “Adaptation.” This past winter, he co-taught an interdisciplinary course, along with CASBS director emerita Margaret Levi and Paula Moya (class of 2016-17 fellow), called “Imagining Adaptive Futures,” which examined how speculative fiction can help us work toward sustainable, equitable, and just futures, even in the face of potentially existential environmental threats. Along with his wife, Libra Hilde (class of 2017-18 fellow), he is a resident fellow at Castaño House. 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. For more information, please find his website at: https://heeh.stanford.edu/

Nan Keohane is a retired scholar of political philosophy who has taught at Swarthmore, Stanford, Wellesley, Duke and Princeton.  She also served as president of Wellesley and then Duke. Keohane was a fellow at CASBS in 1978-79, 1987-88, and 2004-05. Since 2018, she has been a regular visitor to Stanford each winter quarter as a faculty affiliate at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics, working with the postdoctoral fellows. She received her BA from Wellesley, BA/MA at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and PhD in political science at Yale.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Keohane is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1980); Higher Ground:  Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University (Duke University Press, 2006) and Thinking about Leadership (Princeton University Press, 2010). She has co-edited volumes on feminist theory and women and equality. Her current work project, which she will pursue at CASBS while she is in residence, is a book entitled Virginia Woolf and Modern Feminism. 

Robert O. Keohane is professor of international affairs, emeritus, at the School of Public and International Affairs, 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 help manage the “Social Science of Caregiving” with Alison Gopnik and the enCOREage project, whose leadership team also includes Simon Halliday, 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 CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity. She will spend the year fundraising, developing, and leading the Institute. The CASBS Summer Institute engages 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 across the social and behavioral sciences. Murphy will also publish a book, Cultures of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 2024) 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 the founder of the Equity Accelerator, the nation’s first focused-research organization (FRO) focused on harnessing the social and behavioral sciences to create and sustain more equitable learning and working environments—from college through careers. In the area of organizations and tech, her research examines barriers and solutions for increasing gender and racial diversity and inclusion in STEM fields. Murphy has published more than 100 articles that have shaped several 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 fellow in 2015-16 and is a research affiliate in 2023-24.

During her year as a research affiliate, Sylvia Perry will co-direct the CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity, which successfully launched its inaugural class in the summer of 2023. The CASBS Summer Institute focuses on understanding when, how, and why difference makes a difference in the social sciences. By fostering collaboration, providing support within an academic community, and offering professional development opportunities, the Institute aims to empower early career scholars from underrepresented backgrounds in higher education. She will spend the year further developing and implementing the Institute's initiatives centered on diversity. Her research is situated at the intersection of social, developmental, and health psychology, and she investigates how racial bias awareness develops, and the implications of bias awareness for prejudice reduction, intergroup contact, and health disparities. Specifically, her work answers questions such as (1) To what extent do norms around admitting and discussing racism contribute to anti-racism? and (2) How does White parental racial socialization shape the development of their children’s attitudes and behaviors toward Black individuals? Perry is an associate professor of psychology and an Institute for Policy Research faculty fellow at Northwestern University. Her work has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Social Science & Medicine. She is an associate editor at the journal Psychological Science. In 2020, she received the SPSP SAGE Young Scholar Award. She was the 2022-23 SAGE Sara Miller McCune CASBS Fellow.

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, 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 has been a faculty fellow since 2018-19. His website is www.persily.com and Twitter handle is @persily.

Woody Powell is Jacks Family Professor of Education, and (by courtesy) Professor of Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He has been faculty co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society since its founding in 2006. At PACS, he leads the Civic Life of Cities Lab, studying civic life in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, Shenzhen, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, and Vienna. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aalto University, and is an international member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and The British Academy. With Bob Gibbons (MIT), he has led the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) summer institute on Organizations and their Effectiveness since 2016. He was a fellow at CASBS in 1986-87 and 2008-09, and Interim Director in 2022-23. He works on questions of emergence, e.g., where does novelty come from, and historical persistence, e.g. why are some things sticky. 

Abraham Verghese MD, a faculty fellow since 2017-18, is a clinician and heads the Stanford Presence Center, which focuses 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. Past fruitful collaborations with CASBS fellows have utilized insights from sociology, psychology, political science, organizational economics, and other disciplines to further projects at Presence.  Verghese’s non-medical writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, the Atlantic, and other venues. His novel Cutting for Stone (Knopf, 2009) spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His latest novel, The Covenant of Water (Grove Atlantic, 2023) debuted on the New York Times list at #4. At Stanford’s School of Medicine, Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and the Vice Chair for Humanism in the department of medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and pulmonary medicine. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees, 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.

As a faculty fellow in 2023-24, Robb Willer will work on a project using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate experimental results in the social sciences. The forthcoming year will see him exploring the application of LLMs to political research, social science methodology, and the promotion of psychological well-being.

Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford University whose work centers on how to overcome political divisions to foster social change. He employs diverse methods in his research, including survey and behavioral experiments, natural language processing, fMRI, social network analysis. He has consulted for a number of organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the AFL-CIO, the Department of Justice, and two presidential campaigns. His TED talk “How to Have Better Political Conversations” has been viewed over 2.8 million times. Willer’s research has received widespread media coverage including from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Science, Nature, Time, Slate, CNN, NBC Nightly News, and The Today Show. Willer was a CASBS fellow in 2012-13 and 2020-21.

Personal website: https://www.robbwiller.org/

Lab website: https://pascl.stanford.edu/