People

Sam Arenberg

Sam Arenberg is an economist with research in the fields of public, health, and environmental economics. He is interested in the fertility effects of different individual and institutional contexts to understand household preferences and constraints around childbearing. During the 2022-23academic year, Sam will be a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, after which he will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston with a joint appointment between the Economics Department and the Hobby School of Public Affairs.

Julia Behrman

Julia Behrman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her research investigates the causes and consequences of family change in a global perspective. Her research explores how the institution of the family shapes and is shaped by key social phenomenon in four main areas: (i) educational expansion; (ii) environmental change, natural disaster and climate shocks; (iii) expansion of women’s labor force participation; and (iv) migration.

Kathleen Broussard
Kathleen Broussard is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the University of South Carolina and Research Fellow of the Population Wellbeing Initiative. Her research interests include sexual and reproductive health, fertility, gender, and health policy. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialization in demography from the University of Texas Austin.
Mark Budolfson

Mark Budolfson is Assistant Director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin and is on the faculty at Rutgers University. He works on interdisciplinary issues in ethics, economics, and public policy. Recent work includes numerous papers on equity, public policy, and the environment, as well as an NSF-funded project to quantify the socio-economic distribution of health benefits from different climate and air pollution policies, and to evaluate what climate policies are most equitable when those inequalities are taken into account. He is also co-editor with Tristram McPherson and David Plunkett of the Oxford University Press volume Philosophy and Climate Change.

Diane Coffey

Diane Coffey is a demographer in the sociology department and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines social influences on health in India. She is the author, along with Dean Spears, of Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted Development, and the Costs of Caste. Diane holds a PhD from Princeton University and is co-director of the non-profit research organization r.i.c.e.

Zach Freitas-Groff

Zach Freitas-Groff is a Research Associate of the Population Wellbeing Initiative. He is an economist with interests in public, political, and behavioral economics. His research focuses on the long-term consequences of policymaking and the economics of animal welfare. Prior to joining PWI, Zach completed his PhD in economics at Stanford University with support from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Johan Gustafsson

Johan E. Gustafsson is a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, a senior research fellow in philosophy at University of York, and a docent in practical philosophy at University of Gothenburg and at Institute for Futures Studies. His research focuses primarily on the parts of philosophy that relate to the question of what we ought to do, either morally or rationally. Much of this work covers theoretical problems in ethics, value theory, and political philosophy. And much of the rest is on decision theory and, more specifically, on money pumps and moral uncertainty. In metaphysics, he works on free will and personal identity. And, from time to time, he works on the history of these topics.

Payal Hathi

Payal Hathi is a PhD student in Demography and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Research Fellow at r.i.c.e., a research and advocacy organization in India. Her research interests center on social inequality and population health. She has written on issues of gender, caste, and religion, and health in India. Her current work focuses on the effects of climate on stillbirth in low-and middle-income countries, and the poor measurement of stillbirth as a form of mortality.

Petra Kosonen

Petra Kosonen will be a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on population ethics and decision theory, especially issues surrounding tiny probabilities of huge value. She is currently finishing a DPhil thesis in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Previously, she studied at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh.

Kevin Kuruc

Kevin Kuruc is a Research Fellow and Managing Director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative and a Senior Research Affiliate of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford. He is an economist with interests in applied macro-, environmental, and welfare economics. His current research compares the innovation benefits of larger populations against their environmental costs. Prior to joining PWI, Kevin was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Oklahoma.

Nicholas Lawson

Nicholas Lawson is an Associate Professor of Economics at Université du Québec à Montréal, and he previously worked at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics as a postdoctoral fellow. Nicholas’ research is in the areas of labour and public economics, development, and population economics.

Ester Lazzari

Ester Lazzari is a final year PhD student in Demography at the Australian National University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of late fertility and on the ways in which assisted reproduction affects contemporary and future fertility trends. Some of her other research interests include: the self-perception of infertility, fertility desires and intentions, and childlessness. She is trained in applied demography, economics, and econometrics.

Melissa LoPalo

Melissa LoPalo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Economics at Montana State University and a Research Fellow at the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on environmental determinants of health, productivity, and well-being, particularly in developing countries, and the future of low fertility.

Dr. Vasanthakumar Namasivayam

Dr. Vasanth is the Executive Director of Uttar Pradesh Technical Support Unit (UPTSU), striving to improve population level Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child Health and Nutrition (RMNCHN) outcomes in Uttar Pradesh, India by strengthening public sector program delivery at the community, facility and health systems platforms. Heis an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, members of which occupy senior administrative leadership positions at the federal and State level. He is now a faculty member at University of Manitoba, Canada on deputation. He is a medical doctor (MD in Internal Medicine) with Masters in Public Policy (MPP) with Health Policy certification from Princeton University, Masters in Public Health (MPH) with Public Health Economics, Health Systems & Policy certification from Johns Hopkins University and presently a doctoral (DrPH) candidate from JHU.

Jake Nebel

Jake Nebel is a philosopher who studies the ethics of population, distribution, and risk, and the measurement and aggregation of value. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California.

Narae Park

Narae Park is a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an applied-micro economist. She studies how socio-economic factors interact with demographic characteristics such as marriage, fertility, and health. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University.

Marta Prato

Marta Prato is a Cowles Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University. In 2023 she will join Bocconi University as an Assistant Professor. Her research investigates the role of migration and human capital for long-run economic growth. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. In 2021-22 she received the EEA and UniCredit Best Job Market Paper Award and participated in the Restud tour.

Federica Querin

Federica Querin is a demographer whose interests focus on the causes and consequences of low fertility in Western countries. Her research seeks to understand family formation processes in low-fertility settings, focusing on social stratification and the intergenerational transmission of inequality in Europe and the United States. She is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institutes and holds a Ph.D. in Demography and Social Policy from Princeton University and a B.A. and M.S. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University. She received the Charles F. Westoff prize in Demography and was twice awarded the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars.

Melinda A. Roberts

Melinda A. Roberts is a professor of philosophy at the College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on unresolved problems in population ethics, such as whether bringing additional lives into existence is to be valued in the same way, and treated by the law in the same way, as making things better for (including by refraining from harming) existing and future populations. With doctorates in philosophy and law, she is the author of The Existence Puzzles (forthcoming OUP), Abortion and the Moral Significance of Merely Possible Persons and Child Versus Childmaker, and co-editor with David T. Wasserman of Harming Future Persons.

Dean Spears

Dean Spears serves as the Director of PWI. Dean is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, is a visiting economist at the Economics and Planning Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, is a founding Executive Director of r.i.c.e., and is an affiliate of IZA and of the Climate Futures Initiative at Princeton University. At UT-Austin, he is an affiliate of the Population Research Center, the South Asia Institute, and Innovations for Peace and Development.

Christian Tarsney

Christian Tarsney is a senior research fellow in philosophy at PWI, and a senior research affiliate with the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford. He works mainly on questions in ethics and decision theory, including how to weigh tiny probabilities of extreme outcomes, how to deal with uncertainty about basic moral principles, how to compare outcomes in which different numbers of people exist, and to what extent we can predict the very-long-run effects of our present actions. He’s also recently started thinking about philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence.

Sam Trejo

Sam Trejo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. His research uses quasi-experimental, biosocial, and computational methods to explore how social and biological factors jointly shape human development across the life-course, with an emphasis on education and health. Sam is currently writing a book, along with Daphne Martschenko, for Princeton University Press that explores social, ethical, and policy issues related to the DNA revolution.

Sangita Vyas

Sangita Vyas is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Hunter College (CUNY). Her research focuses on population health, the environment, and social inequality in India. Her work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, World Development, and Economics and Human Biology. Sangita has lived and worked on and off in India since 2009, and is a research fellow at r.i.c.e., a non-profit research organization which aims to inform child health policy in India.

Richard Yetter Chappell

Richard Yetter Chappell is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami. He is the author of Parfit’s Ethics, numerous articles in journals including Noûs and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and lead editor of the open-access textbook, An Introduction to Utilitarianism (utilitarianism.net).

Anson Zhou

Anson Zhou is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the NBER. His research studies the aggregate implications of family policies, the past and future of fertility, and factors that determine intergenerational mobility. Anson holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin and will join the faculty at the University of Hong Kong following his postdoctoral position.

Valeria Zurla

Valeria Zurla is an applied microeconomist with research interests in public, labor, and gender economics. Her research investigates the welfare effects and optimal design of social insurance programs and government interventions, focusing on individuals’ and firms’ behavioral responses to policy changes and their implications for policy design. Valeria is particularly interested in studying parental leave, family policies, and the economic consequences of a world of low fertility. Valeria received her PhD in Economics from Brown University in May 2022 and will join CSEF and the University of Naples Federico II as an Assistant Professor in Economics in Fall 2022.