Fresh Faces
IPR Welcomes three new faculty fellows this year

Fall, 2008, Volume 30, Number 2

Ryan A. Brown
Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy
PhD, Anthropology, Emory University, 2006

Anthropologist Ryan A. Brown integrates evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural perspectives in the study of human health, with a focus on violent and risk-taking behaviors.

Currently, Brown is creating a mobile psychophysiology laboratory that will record emotional, biological, and behavioral responses to social stimuli in home settings for population studies. Brown will explore how culture and socialization determine emotional responses to social situations, and, in turn, how variation in emotional responses leads to differences in health outcomes.

Brown is working on several research projects, including the Great Smoky Mountains Study, a large-scale longitudinal study of families and health in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. For three years, he lived and worked in the field, where he developed the Life Trajectory Interview for Youth, one of the first attempts at large-scale, ethnographically based quantitative data collection of youths’ views on their life prospects.

For the past two years, Brown was a Robert Woods Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of California in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Lori Beaman
Assistant Professor of Economics
PhD, Economics, Yale University, 2007

Lori Beaman’s primary fields of interest are development and labor economics, with a focus on how social networks facilitate information transmission. Her previous work has looked at the ways job information spread through social networks among political refugees in the United States. She also has evaluated how a political affirmative action program affected gender bias and electoral outcomes in rural India by providing information on female leadership ability.

Currently, Beaman is looking at how social networks affect household and individual decision making. These projects include the role social networks play in dietary assimilation and obesity among immigrants in the United States; how social ties can heighten or hinder an irrigation project’s success and alleviate poverty though savings-led microfinance in Mali; and the importance of information asymmetries, particularly advantageous selection, in informal labor markets in India.

Beaman is currently a Robert Woods Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley. She will join IPR and Northwestern in January 2009.

David Figlio
Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy; Professor of Human Development, Social Policy, and Learning Sciences
PhD, Economics, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1995

A leading scholar on education policies and interventions, David Figlio explores issues from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design. His current research projects involve evaluating the Florida Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program, the largest school voucher program in the United States; conducting a large-scale study of school accountability in Florida, using a state survey of public school principals; and following children from birth throughout their school careers to study key questions regarding early childhood policy and inequality.

Figlio’s work has been published in numerous leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, and Journal of Human Resources. Organizations supporting his research include the National Science Foundation, Eunice Kennedy Shriver
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and U.S. Department of Education, as well as many foundations.

Figlio is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the executive board of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. He serves as the inaugural editor of the American Education Finance Association’s journal, Education Finance and Policy (MIT Press). He has been a member of many national education task forces and panels, such as the National Research Council’s Panel on K-12 Science Assessment, and has advised several U.S. states, as well as foreign countries, on the design, implementation, and evaluation of education policies.

Figlio joined Northwestern from the University of Florida, where he was Knight-Ridder Professor of Economics. He will direct IPR’s new program on Education Policy. (See the Education Research
cover story.)