Anjali Adukia, Alex Eble, Emileigh Harrison, Hakizumwami Birali Runesha, and Teodora Szasz speaking on What We Teach about Race and Gender.
The Hoover Institution hosts a seminar series on Using Text as Data in Policy Analysis, co-organized by Steven J. Davis and Justin Grimmer. These seminars will feature applications of natural language processing, structured human readings, and machine learning methods to text as data to examine policy issues in economics, history, national security, political science, and other fields.
Our 20th meeting features a conversation with Anjali Adukia, Alex Eble, Emileigh Harrison, Hakizumwami Birali Runesha, and Teodora Szasz on What We Teach about Race and Gender on Tuesday, November 14, 2023 from 9:00AM – 10:30AM PT.
Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College and the director of the MiiE Lab (Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education). In her work, she is interested in understanding how to reduce inequalities such that children from historically disadvantaged backgrounds have equal opportunities to fully develop their potential. Her research is focused on understanding factors that motivate and shape behavior, preferences, attitudes, and educational decision-making, with a particular focus on early-life influences. She examines how the provision of basic needs—such as safety, health, justice, and representation—can increase school participation and improve child outcomes in developing contexts.
Alex Eble is Associate Professor of Economics and Education at Columbia’s graduate school of education, Teachers College. His research focuses primarily on two key themes: the economics of education in low-income contexts, and the economics of beliefs and information applied to education and inequality. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Faculty Affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. His work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Nature Human Behavior, among other outlets. He received his PhD and AM in economics from Brown University, MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and BA from Indiana University, Bloomington.
Emileigh Harrison is a PhD candidate studying Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on understanding barriers to education (such as financial constraints or beliefs about academic abilities shaped by representation) and the role that education policy can play in eliminating them. Her recent work focuses on applying natural language processing and computer vision tools to measure changes in gender and racial representation in educational content. She also examines the impact of higher education policies on social mobility for students from low-income and historically marginalized backgrounds. Her work evaluates a range of policies, such as financial aid program design, articulation agreements, and remedial coursework placement policies. She is 2023 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow, a Discovery Doctoral Fellow at the Data Science Institute, and a Committee on Education Fellow at UChicago.
Hakizumwami Birali Runesha is the Associate Vice President for Research Computing and founding Director of the Research Computing Center (RCC) at The University of Chicago. He is the former Director of Scientific Computing and Applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, Research Associate at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Assistant Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Kinshasa. Dr Runesha has more than 28 years of experience in high performance computing, data science and scientific software development. His research interests are in sparse numerical libraries, finite element analysis, AI/Deep Learning, and reproducibility of scientific research. He is the co-Chair of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory committee on Cyberinfrastructure, member of the African Center of Excellence in Internet of Things (ACEIoT) International Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB), member of the Reimagining Climate Governance in the Digital Age advisory committee and former president of the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computing (GLCPC).
Teodora Szasz is an Innovation Director at Philips, managing innovation projects (such as AI-based diagnosis of cardiac diseases) between Philips and UChicago Medicine. Prior to this, Teodora has worked for six years as a Senior Computational Scientist for the Research Computing Center at The University of Chicago, where she engaged the community of researchers involved in computational image analysis at The University of Chicago across multi-disciplinary areas including: Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Public Policy, and Cancer Research. She received her PhD in Computer Science from The Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France.
Steven Davis is the Thomas W. And Susan B. Ford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies business dynamics, labor markets, and public policy. He advises the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum and is co-creator of the Economic Policy Uncertainty Indices, the Survey of Business Uncertainty, and the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes.
Justin Grimmer is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His current research focuses on American political institutions, elections, and developing new machine-learning methods for the study of politics.
