Michael Baron is a senior instructor for data analytics, data science, statistics, and business analytics courses at eCornell and Cornell University. His research interests include statistical methods, experimental design, and computational social science as they relate to leadership in disaster response, as well as equity, diversity, and inclusion policies. Baron holds a Doctor of Education in leadership and learning in organizations from Vanderbilt University Peabody College. He is the author of Increasing Student Engagement in Advanced Placement Classes in High School. This includes the implications of student engagement for enabling a diversity of perspectives in classrooms.
Andrew Crosby
Andy Crosby is Assistant Professor of Instruction in the MPPA program at Northwestern. He teaches a wide variety of courses including Research Methods, Elements of Public Finance and Budgeting, Statistics for Research, Scope and Theory of Public Policy, and Intergovernmental Relations. His research interests include public and nonprofit financial management, and intergovernmental relations. Prior to joining the MPPA faculty, he served as an assistant professor of public administration at Pace University in New York City. His scholarly work has appeared in Public Budgeting and Finance, the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting, and Financial Management, Tobacco Control, and other journals. Crosby is also the past president of the American Society for Public Administration New York Metropolitan Chapter. He completed his PhD in public administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago with concentrations in financial management and survey methods.
Angela Fontes is vice president in the Economics, Justice, and Society Department, and director of the Behavioral and Economic Analysis and Decision-making (BEAD) program at NORC at the University of Chicago. At NORC, Fontes oversees research focused on household finance and investor decision-making, with a specific focus on the financial well-being of African American and Hispanic/Latino families. Using both traditional economic methods, as well as methods from behavioral science and marketing, Fontes delivers actionable insights for a diverse set of stakeholders.
A nationally-recognized expert in household finance, Fontes is regularly quoted in national and trade press and is a frequent speaker on topics related to financial wellbeing. She is the Principal Investigator on several projects, including work with the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct investor protection research, and NORC’s ongoing collaboration with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation. Her research can be found in journals such as the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Family and Economic Issues, the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, and Financial Counseling and Planning.
Prior to NORC, Fontes worked in business and market research consulting with Chamberlain Research Consultants and Leo Burnett. She is adjunct faculty at Northwestern University where she was recently awarded a Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award. At Northwestern, Fontes teaches graduate courses in behavioral economics and public policy, and program evaluation. Fontes is incoming President of the American Council on Consumer Interests, and on the Board of Directors of the Northwest Side Housing Center. Fontes holds a PhD in consumer behavior and family economics with a minor in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®).
Sara Kuehlhorn Friedman is an adjunct lecturer in the MPPA program at Northwestern. Her research interests include the intersection of civic capacity and governance at the local, state, and federal levels. Before joining the MPPS faculty, she worked for the Center for Public Service at Portland State University as a researcher on various projects and she coordinated research for visiting Korean practitioner scholars from Seoul Metropolitan Government. Friedman currently provides project support for county-level equity assessment projects through the National Policy Consensus Center in Oregon. Friedman is past president of the Cascade Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration and remains active in the association. Friedman completed her PhD in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, where she explored immigration federalism and focused on issues relating to social equity, civil society, and global governance. Friedman holds a Master of Public Administration degree and a Master of Teaching English as a Second Language degree.
Erna Gevondyan is a Principal Energy Systems Risk Analyst in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory—the first of 17 U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories tasked with tackling critical scientific challenges. Erna's research involves applying risk assessment techniques in support of efforts in fostering safety at nuclear power plants in developing nations, and other projects focused on the implementation of programs in support of safety at international nuclear facilities.
Additionally, Erna's work includes safety research projects in support of U.S. offshore energy. A great deal of this work involves processing large data sets to provide a technical basis to inform the key decision-makers. Erna is a graduate of Northwestern University (MPPA, 2019) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S., Computer Science, 2015). As a transplant from the republic of Georgia—a former USSR republic, and a descendant of Armenian ancestry, Erna is fluent in the Russian, Georgian, and Armenian languages.
Mark Keightley is an economist with the nonpartisan Congressional Research Services (CRS) in Washington, DC. At CRS, he advises Congress and their staff on fiscal policy, business and international corporate taxation, and housing tax policy. Before joining CRS, Keightley was an associate with the Congressional Budget Office and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis. He has taught at Syracuse University, the College of William & Mary George Mason University, and George Washington University. Keightley’s research has been cited by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, U.S. Supreme Court, Government Accountability Office, Federal Reserve of Dallas, Brookings Institution, Cato Institute, Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, Center on Budget Policies and Priorities, Bloomberg, NY Times, CNN, Businessweek, Reuters, Tax Notes, Daily Tax Report, and various academic publications. Keightley earned an MS and PhD in economics from Florida State University.
Gregory Kuhn
Gregory Kuhn currently is director of government management consulting at Sikich LLP and was assistant director for public management and training at Northern Illinois University’s Center for Governmental Studies. Kuhn has more than 28 years of combined governmental, consulting and higher education experience. He was the inaugural faculty director of the MPPA program and continues to be program adviser and lecturer. His primary teaching areas include public policy, leadership, public administration and budgeting. He also served as an instructor/lecturer for Northern Illinois University’s public administration program, and he has earned teaching awards at both NIU and SCS. Kuhn earned an MPA and PhD in public administration, public policy and organizational theory from Northern Illinois University.
Jerry Lassa is a performance excellence professional with over 15 years experience in the health care sector, serving his first t 10 years in acute care at Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH) and the past five in ambulatory care at the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services. The study and application of medical informatics decision support has been a core component of his professional practice. Early in his tenure at NMH, Lassa served on a National Library of Medicine-funded research team at that studied the information needs of clinicians in ambulatory care and implemented an electronic health record at various Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation practices. More recently as the director of performance excellence with the Alliance, he is leading the development of clinical performance measures reporting through a data warehouse for the electronic health record system that is being deployed across 10-plus community health centers that serve 100,000 under- and uninsured patients annually in Chicago. In addition, Lassa has supported numerous clinical pathway teams and deployed an operational and clinical benchmarking system for NMH that enabled benchmarking of resource and ancillary utilization. Lassa consults and speaks nationally on performance excellence in health care, as well as teaching statistics and performance excellence at SCS. He received his MS in applied mathematics with a statistics concentration from DePaul University and a BS in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign.
Karl T. Muth, JD, MBA, MPhil, PhD, has taught at Northwestern for over a decade and also teaches at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. An expert in the regulation of securities markets and tradeable obligations, his policy research and recommendations have been cited by the Secretary of the SEC, a Commissioner of the SEC, and in many Proposed Rules and Final Rules. Muth has presented research to the SEC, the Comptroller of the Currency, officials at the Treasury Department and HM Treasury (UK), analysts from the US and UK intelligence communities, senior officers of multilateral anti-piracy and anti-money-laundering (AML) task forces, and members of Congress; he was the primary defense expert witness in case involving a billion-dollar alleged corporate financing fraud. His research appears in a wide range of journals, including The Harvard Africa Policy Journal, The Harvard Blackletter Law Journal, The Harvard Kennedy School Review and The Journal of Private Equity, as well as in the Oxford Handbook (Oxford Press) on policy administration and in Controversies in Globalization (CQ Press 2d Ed.), an oft-assigned undergraduate-level text on macro-scale policy questions. Most recently, he presented his research on racial discrimination in the Chicago housing market at the 2023 American Economic Association annual conference and submitted testimony on several key 2023 SEC rules matters.
Zachary H. Seeskin is a Senior Statistician with NORC at the University of Chicago, where he works on sample design, estimation, and data analysis for government and public interest surveys. Seeskin further contributes to imputation, adaptive design, total survey error analysis, and small area estimation for such surveys as the National Immunization Survey and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients. His expertise includes analyzing administrative data quality and combining data sources for evidence-building, topics on which he has published research in the Statistical Journal of the International Association of Official Statistics and the International Journal of Population Data Science. In addition, Seeskin and colleagues are developing automated statistical tools to assist researchers with evaluating quality of state and local administrative data sources. Seeskin holds a PhD in statistics from Northwestern University where he served as a U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellow.
Andy Sharma is a political economist whose areas of specialty include aging, health disparities, later-life migration and quantitative methods. Currently he works with the Cedar Grove Institute on a project to employ statistical methodology to examine the adverse impact of economic and racial isolation on student performance in North Carolina. A research article from this investigation was published in Education Policy Analysis Archives (Volume 22, 2014) and this study was cited and listed under Table of Authorities in an Amicus Brief filed by the Society of American Law Teachers in the Fisher II case with the United States Supreme Court (October 2015). He has also published in other highly regarded journals, such as Ageing and Society, Applied Geography, Disability and Rehabilitation, Journal of Aging and Health, and Women’s Health Issues. Sharma is a former recipient of the Carolina Population Center Fellowship with training grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. He also received the Future Faculty Fellowship and Weiss Urban Livability Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD. He has master degrees in mathematics from Loyola University Chicago and economics from DePaul University.