People

Biography

Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts, Jr., PhD, is Associate Professor of History (Columbia University School of the Arts and Sciences) and Sociomedical Sciences (Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health), and is also a former Director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS). Dr. Roberts writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American urban history, especially medicine, public health, and science and technology. His widely acclaimed book, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), is an exploration of the political economy of race and the modern American public health state between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, a period which encompasses the overlapping and mutually-informed eras of Jim Crow segregation and modern American public health practice.

Roberts currently is researching and writing a book-length project on the United States’s troubled history of race and recovery, examining the social and political history of heroin addiction treatment from the 1950s to the early 1990s. This project traces urban policy at the beginning of the postwar heroin epidemic, the emergence of therapeutic communities, the politics of state-run addiction rehabilitation facilities, the adoption of methadone maintenance treatment in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of “radical recovery” movements and harm reduction and syringe exchange in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 2013-14, Dr. Roberts was the Policy Director of Columbia University’s newly inaugurated Justice Initiative (now the Columbia University Center for Justice) and was the editor of the Center’s first research publication Aging in Prison: Reducing Elder Incarceration and Promoting Public Safety (2015). At the Columbia University Center for Science and Society, he leads the Research Cluster for the Historical Study of Race, Inequality, and Health. He also is the co-editor of Columbia University Press’s book series in Race, Inequality, and Health. In 2018, Dr. Roberts launched the podcast series People Doing Interesting Stuff (PDIS) (available on iTunes and other podcasting platforms) in which he speaks with people working in public health and social justice, especially harm reduction, HIV/AIDS work, reproductive justice, and criminal justice reform.

His X (formerly Twitter) account is @SamuelKRoberts.

Biography

Matt Mendoza is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). He studies organizational processes resulting in income inequality between people in different class, gender, and ethnoracial groups, with a focus on the US. His work applies quantitative methods to linked employer-employee data on workers and their workplace contexts. At ISERP, he works with Prof. Yinon Cohen developing methods to distribute US manufacturing sector income to different economic and demographic groups from Census Bureau microdata, part of Prof. Tali Kristal’s (University of Haifa) Distributional Workplace Accounts project.

Biography 

Jiang Mao is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Cognitive and Behavioral Economics Initiative (CBEI) with the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). She works with Professor Michael Woodford on the cognitive processes underlying economic decision making. Coming from a psychology and neuroscience background with a focus on perceptual decision making, she now combines human behavior experiments and Bayesian inference models to study how noisy representations of the decision situation lead to systematic biases in economic behaviors.

Biography

Jeffry Frieden is Professor of International and Public Affairs and Political Science at Columbia University. He specializes in the politics of international economic relations. Frieden is the author of Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (2007); second updated edition 2020); of Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (2015); and the co-author (with Menzie Chinn) of Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recover (2012). Frieden is also the author of Debt, Development, and Democracy: Modern Political Economy and Latin America, 1965-1985 (1992), of Banking on the World: The Politics of American International Finance (1987), and the co-author or co-editor of over a dozen other books on related topics. His articles on the politics of international economic issues have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general-interest publications.

Biography

Greer Mellon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University in the Population Studies and Training Center, and she is also affiliated with the Annenberg Institute. She is a sociologist who researches educational and labor market inequalities in the United States. She is particularly interested in how leadership and organizational policies can be leveraged to reduce social inequalities. She is primarily a quantitative scholar, and conducts research with large-scale administrative data and survey experiments. Her work has been published in Sociology of Education. She has received support for her research from the NaEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and the Russell Sage Foundation.