Directors
Edward Miguel – Faculty Director
Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. He has published over 90 articles and chapters in leading academic journals and collected volumes, and his work has been cited over 25,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, is a recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics, and a 2002 Berkeley Hellman Fellow. He is a recipient of the 2015 U.C. Berkeley Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, the 2012 Berkeley campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, the Best Graduate Adviser Award in the Berkeley Economics Department, and has served on over 110 completed doctoral dissertation committees. He is the author of Africa’s Turn? (MIT Press 2009), co-author of Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations (Princeton University Press 2008), and Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research (UC Press, 2019).
Miguel earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT and received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow.
Scholars
Fernando Hoces de la Guardia – Project Scientist
Fernando Hoces de la Guardia is a Project Scientist at BITSS and an affiliate of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). Fernando works on bridging research-to-policy gaps in regards to transparency and reproducibility and improving the computational reproducibility of economics research. He received his Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School where his research focused on increasing the transparency and reproducibility of policy analysis as a way to strengthen the connection between policy and evidence. Before RAND, he studied economics and conducted impact evaluations and economic analyses of various social policies. Fernando has also supported BITSS-led trainings in the past and led a series of Catalyst trainings in South America in 2017.
Program Support
Jo Weech – Program Manager
Jo Weech is the Research Transparency Program Manager at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). She holds a Master of Public Policy (MPP) from George Washington University and a BA in International Relations from William & Mary. Prior to joining CEGA, Jo managed U.S. government-funded international development programs, overseeing projects on transnational crime, access to justice, and juvenile justice in Latin America. She is passionate about initiatives that bridge the gap between academic research and actionable, evidence-based policymaking.
Advisory Board
Stuart Buck
Stuart Buck is the Executive Director of the Good Science Project. He has a Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas; a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School; and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Georgia. As a Vice President at Arnold Ventures, Stuart funded renowned work showing that scientific research is often irreproducible, including the Reproducibility Projects in Psychology and Cancer Biology. As a grantmaker, he helped launch the Center for Open Science, Vivli, the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford, the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience, the Yale Collaboration on Research Integrity and Transparency, and the Evidence-Based Medicine DataLab at Oxford. He was instrumental in creating the TOP Guidelines, the world’s most widely-adopted standards for scientific publication. He has also been a reviewer for Science, Bioinformatics, and BMJ, and served for several years on the executive committee of the Harvard Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center.
Abel Brodeur
Abel Brodeur is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa. He received his Ph.D. in Economics at the Paris School of Economics. He specializes in Applied Microeconomics and has published in journals such as the American Economic Review and the Economic Journal. His recent works focuses on publication bias and p-hacking. He received early career awards such as the John Charles Polanyi Prizes for Economic Science and the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science. He founded and chairs the Institute for Replication (I4R). I4R works to improve the credibility of science by systematically reproducing and replicating research findings in leading academic journals.
Stefano DellaVigna
Stefano DellaVigna (2002 Ph.D., Harvard) is the Daniel Koshland, Sr. Distinguished Professor of Economics and Professor of Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in Behavioral Economics and has published in international journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has been a Principal Investigator for NSF Grants (2004-07 and 2016-18), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow for 2008-10, and is a Distinguished Teaching Award winner (2008). He has been a co-editor of the American Economic Review since 2017. His recent work has focused on (i) the economics of the media; (ii) the design of model-based field experiments, (iii) the ability of experts to forecast research results, and (iv) the analysis of editorial choices in scientific journals.
Kevin Esterling
Kevin Esterling is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, and the Director of the Laboratory for Technology, Communication, and Democracy (TeCD Lab), at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). His research focuses on institutional design for communication in democratic politics, and he has interests in Bayesian statistics, experimental design, and science ethics and validity. His current work focuses on deliberative democracy and the design of technology that leads citizens to engage constructively in public discourse. He is the author of The Political Economy of Expertise: Information and Efficiency in American National Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and co-author of Politics with the People: Building a Directly Representative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has published in a number of journals, including the American Political Science Review, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Political Analysis, and the Journal of Politics. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, The Democracy Fund, and the MacArthur Foundation. Esterling was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral research fellow at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1999.
Donald Green
Donald Green is a Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, having moved there in 2011 after 22 years at Yale University. The author of four books and more than one hundred essays, Green’s research interests span a wide array of topics: voting behavior, partisanship, campaign finance, hate crime, and research methods. Much of his current work uses field experimentation to study the ways in which political campaigns mobilize and persuade voters. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and was awarded the Heinz I. Eulau Award for best article published in the American Political Science Review during 2009. In 2010, he helped found the Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association and served as its first president. Green received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988.
Hilary Hoynes
Hilary Hoynes is a Professor of Economics and Public Policy and holds the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities at the University of California Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab. She specializes in the study of poverty, inequality, food and nutrition programs, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low-income families. Professor Hoynes is a member of the American Economic Association’s Executive Committee, the Federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policy Making, and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Building an Agenda to Reduce the Number of Children in Poverty by Half in 10 Years. From 2011 to 2016 she was the co-editor of the leading journal in economics the American Economic Review. In 2014 she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the Committee on the Status of the Economics Profession of the American Economic Association. Previously, she was a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation, Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and the National Advisory Committee of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program.
John Ioannidis
John Ioannidis holds the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University and is a Professor of Medicine, of Health Research and Policy, and of Statistics. Ioannidis directs the Stanford Prevention Research Center (SPRC) at Stanford University School of Medicine and co-directs the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS). Dr. Ioannidis has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Clinical Investigation and has been on the editorial boards of leading international journals (including PLoS Medicine, Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, JNCI, Science Translational Medicine and Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, among others.) He graduated top of his class from the School of Medicine and received his doctorate in biopathology from the University of Athens. From 1999 until 2010 he chaired the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology at the School of Medicine, University of Ioannina in Greece. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians, and the European Academy of Cancer Sciences and has served as President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology.
Don Moore
Don Moore is a Professor of Management of Organizations at the Haas School of Business. He runs the Moore Accuracy Lab at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on human overconfidence in decision-making, negotiation, and ethical choice. He has been active in the research transparency community, promoting the use of pre-analysis plans and study registries in psychology and widely practicing and advocating for open science. He has made much of his data available on both OSF and his personal website. Before coming to Haas, he was an Associate Professor at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business. He has a double-jointed thumb on his left hand and he can do calligraphy.
Brian Nosek
Brian Nosek received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002 and is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. In 2007, he received early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network (ISCON) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). He co-founded Project Implicit, an Internet-based multi-university collaboration of research and education about implicit cognition – thoughts and feelings that exist outside of awareness or control. Nosek investigates the gap between values and practices – such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one’s intentions and goals. Research applications of this interest are implicit bias, diversity and inclusion, automaticity, social judgment and decision-making, attitudes, beliefs, ideology, morality, identity, memory, and barriers to innovation. Through lectures, training, and consulting, Nosek applies scientific research to improve the alignment between personal and organizational values and practices. Nosek also co-founded and directs the Center for Open Science (COS) that operates the Open Science Framework. The COS aims to increase the openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research.
Betsy Levy Paluck
Betsy Levy Paluck is a Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Deputy Director of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy. She is also a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. Much of her work has focused on prejudice and intergroup conflict reduction, using large-scale field experiments to test theoretically driven interventions. Through field experiments that test social psychological theories in Central and Horn of Africa and in the United States, she has examined the impact of the mass media and interpersonal communication on tolerant and cooperative behaviors. Her work in post-conflict countries has led to related research on political cultural change and on civic education. Dr. Paluck is also interested in social scientific methodology—particularly causal inference and behavioral measurement.
Matthew Rabin
Matthew Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. Before that, he was at UC Berkeley for 25 years, as the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Professor of Economics for the latter part of that time. His research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. He received his PhD from MIT in 1989, the same year he joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor. He is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and co-organizer of the Russell Sage Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics. He has been a visiting professor at M.I.T., London School of Economics, Northwestern, Harvard, and Cal Tech, as well as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (at Stanford) and the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Rabin’s honors include Most Likely to Express His Opinion (Springbrook High School); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow; graduate Economics Association Outstanding Teaching Award; MacArthur Foundation Fellow; Econometric Society Fellow; John Bates Clark Medal from American Economic Association; and Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Paul Romer
Paul Romer is an American economist, entrepreneur, and activist. He is currently a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Prior to that, Romer was a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Hoover Institution, and a fellow at the Center for Global Development. He is a pioneer of endogenous growth theory. Romer earned a B.S. in mathematics in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1983, both from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. He was named one of America’s 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1997. Romer was awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics in 2002, and a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018.
Simine Vazire
Simine Vazire is the Director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge Laboratory at UC Davis. She teaches courses on research methods, replicability, personality, and self-knowledge. Her research, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines accuracy and bias in people’s perceptions of their own behavior and personality. She also conducts meta-science examining how people interpret scientific findings and tracks trends in the methods and results of published studies in psychology over time. She is a Senior Editor at Collabra: Psychology, Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPSS), and Co-Founder and President of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS).
Current Research Support
Gufran Pathan – Pre-Doctoral Research Research Fellow
Gufran graduated from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley where he pursued a Master’s in Development Practice. He has over seven years of professional work experience working as a data scientist in the finance and tech industry. His research interests are in understanding the economics of culture, identity, and discrimination. He is also interested in the application of machine learning methods in International Development.
Viviane Helena Silva da Rocha – Pre-Doctoral Research Research Fellow
Viviane is a Predoctoral Research Fellow with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), supporting the Reporting Guidelines for Publication Bias project, which ultimately seeks to improve the transparency and reproducibility of social science research. Prior to joining CEGA, she was a Research and Policy Associate of the Jobs and Opportunity Initiative in Brazil (JOI Brazil) at J-PAL LAC. JOI Brazil improves the understanding of how best to promote quality jobs and disseminate this knowledge to different actors in Brazil so that public policies and programs are based on scientific evidence. Viviane also worked with the Sustainable Development Department of the French public agency Expertise France supporting the implementation of the EUROCLIMA+ regional cooperation program of the European Commission funded by the European Union, aimed at promoting ecologically sustainable and climate resilient development in eighteen Latin American countries. Viviane holds a master’s degree in Development Economics from the Institute of Development Studies (IEDES) of the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ).
Previous Research Support
Brian Lee – Communications Intern, Summer 2022
Brian majors in Political Science (with a focus on International Relations) and minors in Hispanic Studies at Columbia University. Expected to graduate in 2024, he is interested in exploring the intersection between public policy and political theory with data analytics and social science research.
Jui Paithane – Intern, 2021
Jui majored in Global Studies and obtained a Technology Management certificate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020. She looks forward to cultivating her creative passions, like graphic design and video illustration, through working with organizations aimed at increasing equity and equality. Combining graphic design and advocacy, Jui hopes to use art to help educate the world on pressing issues affecting human rights, the environment, and much more.
Sreeja Apparaju – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Spring 2021
Sreeja majors in Economics and Computer Science and is expected to graduate in 2023. She is interested in financial economics and applying computer science skills to economic research.
Rohan Jha – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Spring 2021
Rohan majors in Economics and Data Science and is expected to graduate in 2024. Academically, he is interested in using data analytics to shed new light on economic concepts.
Gabriel Kelvin – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Spring 2021
Gabriel majors in Political Science, with an emphasis in Empirical Theory and Quantitative Methods, and minors in Public Policy. He is expected to graduate in 2022. He is interested in quantitative analysis, labor and assistance policy outcomes, evidence-informed legislation and policy representation.
Emma Ng – Undergraduate Research Apprentice
Emma majors in Environmental Economics and Policy and is expected to graduate in 2021. Her academic interests include equitable community and economic development, sustainability, and environmental regulation.
Lauren Peterson – Undergraduate Research Apprentice
Lauren majors in Economics and Global Studies and is expected to graduate in 2022. She is interested in the intersection of global developments and economic growth, specifically how economics inspires coordination or conflict between countries and peoples across the globe.
Jiayu (Ella) Shi – Undergraduate Research Apprentice
Jiayu’s major is Computer Science and her minor is Data Science. She is interested in algorithms and data science.
Max Zhang – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Spring 2021
Max majors in Economics and Statistics and is expected to graduate in 2023. He is interested in statistical inference and development economics, specifically how the techniques of both can be used in the fight against poverty, inequality, and climate change.
Peter Zhang – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Spring 2021
Peter majors in Economics and Computer Science and is expected to graduate in 2024. He is interested in public policy and behavioral economics.
Faris Alrubaish – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Fall 2020
Faris majors in Economics and is expected to graduate in 2022. He is interested in development and behavioral economics.
Samria Gholami – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Fall 2020
Samira majors in Economics and is expected to graduate in 2021. She is interested in public policy with a focus on social safety net programs.
Charles Love – Undergraduate Research Apprentice, Fall 2020
Charlie majors in Political Science and Data Science and is expected to graduate in 2023. Main academic interests: He is interested in using data analysis to solve problems related to his passions, which include sports, political science, and international relations.
Aleksandra Ma – Intern, Fall 2020
Aleksandra majors in Statistics and Data Science and graduated in 2020. She is interested in exploring and understanding how information and society interact, and how to promote transparency and privacy in the practice of data science.