Molly M. Jacobs, MS, PhD is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida in the College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Health Services Research, Management and Policy. She received her doctorate from the George Washington University Department of Economics with a concentration in econometrics and labor economics. She holds a master’s degree in economics from George Washington University and degrees in economics and German from Duke University. Her research involves economic evaluation of healthcare, health outcomes, and health expenditures. She specializes in the design, implementation, and valuation of health interventions targeting quality of life, outcomes, and impairments. She has published across the fields of medicine, public health, and health services research recently co-authoring two book chapters on the analysis of health outcomes among marginalized and vulnerable populations.

Currently she is engaged in interdisciplinary research grants from NIH and HRSA with faculty from the School of Dental Medicine, Physician Assistant Studies, and Communication Sciences and Disorders. She is currently the Principal Investigator on a grant from Bristol Myers Squibb investing racial disparities in post stroke outcome. Dr. Jacobs was asked to serve as co-editor of the first-ever health economics focused issue of Seminars in Speech and Language published in March 2022.

Dr. Jacobs served for four years as an agricultural economist for the USDA and was named a Fulbright Scholar to Berlin, Germany. She is a member of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Systems for Action Scientific Review Board and serves as a liaison to the American Economic Association (AEA) Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). In 2020, she was named one of ECU’s Outstanding Faculty and received the 2020-2021 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research. In 2022, she received the Dean’s Citation award from the University of Florida College of Public Health and Health Professions for her publication providing the first-ever estimate of the economic burden of aphasia in the US.

Dr. Nathaniel Burke is an assistant professor in the economics department at West Virginia University’s John C. Chambers College of Business and Economics. Nathaniel’s primary research fields are behavioral economics and education with a special interest in using experiments and the economics of identity. He looks at the ways policies have identity-differing impacts on marginalized groups and the ways that identity impacts rational behavior and decision-making in both lab and field experimental settings.

Nathaniel did his Ph.D. at the University of Arkansas and received his M. S. in Resource and Applied Economics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Nathaniel did his B.A. in Economics at Manhattan College in NYC where he was also a D1 Track and Field athlete. Prior to entering his master’s degree program, Nathaniel spent 5 years in the Army on active duty and received an honorable discharge in 2016. While in the military, Nathaniel received an A.A.S in Intelligence Operations from Cochise College and a Linguistic Certification in Korean linguistics from the Defense Language Institute – Foreign Language Center at the Presidio of Monterey, CA.

Nathaniel’s cultural background is Afro-Puerto Rican. His family is primarily in the northeast in the NY/PA area with much of his family still living in Puerto Rico. Nathaniel is also an alumni member of the Kappa Omega Sigma Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc., a historically Black cultural fraternity.

When Nathaniel is not working on research or teaching, he enjoys game nights with his family, walking his dog around Morgantown, hiking, biking, and running. He also likes coding new experimental games in Python, gaming with his brother, and engaging with low-income/marginalized students as a tutor and mentor.

Nathaniel lives in Morgantown, WV with his wife, son, dog, and cat.

Patrick Conway is Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been on the faculty of UNC since 1983. During that time, he has taught courses in introductory economics, international economics, development economics and macroeconomics both to undergraduates and to graduate students. He has also served as Chair of the Department of Economics, Diversity Coordinator in Economics and as Academic Director of the Shuford Program in Entrepreneurship. He served as a Faculty Mentor for the American Economic Association (AEA) Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics between 2008 and 2012.

His research has focused upon the international aspects of trade and finance with emerging economies. He is the author of three books and many refereed journal articles. His current research interests include the impact of IMF lending programs on emerging-economy welfare, the development of financial markets in transition economies, the welfare impact of exchange-rate depreciation in developing countries, and the dynamic adjustment of import-competing industries to international competition.

He served in the Peace Corps in Cote d’Ivoire in 1975-77, and as a special assistant to the US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs in 1980-81. He has served as an international and macroeconomic expert on World Bank missions to Morocco, Tunisia, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Belarus, and has twice been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He was named a Council on Foreign Relations fellow in 1989 for his work on the implications of the debt crisis for developing countries. He has worked more recently with the UN Conference on Trade and Development to analyze the impact of trade barriers on emerging-economy welfare.

He was awarded the UNC Board of Governors Award for Teaching Excellence and the William C. Friday Award for Excellence in Teaching at UNC and has been inducted into the Order of the Golden Fleece and the Frank Porter Graham Honor Society. He received a Pew Faculty Fellowship in International Affairs from Harvard University for his innovative use of cases in instruction. He has facilitated pedagogical sessions for economists at the AEA annual meeting on four occasions and was a faculty trainer in the Teaching Innovations Program sponsored by the AEA Committee on Economic Education. He was the founding director of the Center for Faculty Excellence on the UNC Chapel Hill campus and received the Kenneth Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award from the Southern Economic Association.

He attended Georgetown University in Washington, DC as an undergraduate, and received his BSFS degree in 1975. After the Peace Corps he did graduate work at Princeton University, receiving an MPA degree in 1979 and a PhD in Economics in 1984.

His work on poverty in North Carolina began during his year as a Global Research Institute Fellow in 2011. He has written a number of papers on the incidence of poverty in North Carolina, using county-level information over time to identify the potential causes of high-poverty counties. He has been on the board of advisors of the Center for Poverty, Work and Opportunity since its inception.

Dr. Peter Q. Blair is on the faculty at Harvard University in the Graduate School of Education where he co-directs the Harvard Project on Workforce. He serves as a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Principal Investigator of the BE-Lab – a research group with partners across several universities. His group’s research focuses on questions at the intersection of the economics of education, labor economics, public economics and the economics of digitization. In addition to his scholarly work, Dr. Blair has served as a volunteer economist with the Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden-Harris presidential transition. He is also an active member of his local church. Dr. Blair received his Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, his M.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University, and his B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from Duke University. He is the youngest of his parents’ seven sons, and got his start understanding markets by selling fruit and vegetables in the Bahamas in the Nassau Straw Market with his brothers.

Executive Vice President and Provost Rachel T.A. Croson is the chief academic officer of the University of Minnesota multi-campus system and provost for the Twin Cities campus, with overarching responsibility for fostering the academic excellence of the educational and research missions of the University and providing leadership for undergraduate, graduate, and professional education.

Croson came to the University of Minnesota from Michigan State University (MSU), where she served as Dean of the College of Social Science and MSU Foundation Professor of Economics. Prior to her tenure at MSU, she served as dean of the School of Business at the University of Texas at Arlington, division director for Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation, professor and director of the Negotiations Center at the University of Texas at Dallas, and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. She earned her bachelor’s degree in economics and the philosophy of science from the University of Pennsylvania and her master’s and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Provost Croson’s research focuses on experimental and behavioral economics; studying how people make economic decisions, what mistakes they make, and how to improve their performance. This research draws from and contributes to multiple disciplines. Substantively her research has focused on the voluntary provision of public goods (especially public radio), bargaining and negotiation, behavioral operations management, and gender and cultural differences. She was pivotal in creating and leading workshops to help female junior faculty in Economics advance through the profession, and won the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association (2017). She is currently a AAAS Fellow (class of 2021) and appointed as a McKnight Endowed Professor in the Department of Economics.