2011 - 2012 Academic Year Fellows
Caitlin Elsaesser
Dr. Caitlin Elsaesser is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. She is a licensed clinical social worker and completed her MSW and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. The overarching goal of Dr. Elsaesser’s work is to partner with youth and communities to create health promotion efforts that are empowering and accessible. Dr. Elsaesser’s work is guided by critical race and feminist theories. With an understanding that those with lived experience hold key expertise in health, her work draws on community-based participatory methodology. Her career as a researcher is built on a decade of direct experience working with adolescents and families in Chicago, first as a high school teacher and later as a social worker.
Dominic Gibson
Dominic is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University and the University of Washington. Dominic was a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology at UChicago. He received his PhD, also from the Department of Psychology, in 2017. Dominic’s research interests include numerical and spatial cognition, language acquisition, the role of language in acquiring new concepts and how input from teachers and parents interacts with children’s preexisting knowledge about these concepts. Dominic received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University. After graduating, he worked in the Laboratory for Child Development at Johns Hopkins studying spatial working memory.
Rebecca Hinze-Pifer
Rebecca Hinze-Pifer is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership. She holds a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago, a Master’s of Public Policy from George Washington University, and a B.S. in astrophysics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Dr Hinze-Pifer’s research focuses on school-based approaches to reducing social inequality, with particular focus on programs and practices influencing adolescent socioemotional development. Her work includes a mixture of randomized field experiments of school-based programs and quasi-experimental studies of using school administrative data to understand the impacts of school policies. Dr. Hinze-Pifer has published and presented on a range of related topics, including school discipline, teacher classroom management practices, and student responses to community violence.
Nolan Pope
Dr. Nolan Pope joined the Department of Economics beginning in Fall 2017. Professor Pope is an labor economist and applied microeconomist who specializes in public policy that improves individuals’ labor market and educational outcomes. Nolan uses quasi-experiments, large administrative data sets, and field experiments to answer questions in education, public economics, and labor economics.
His recent research focuses on how measuring and rating teacher quality affects both students and teachers, and how public policies influence underprivileged groups such as immigrants and low-income populations. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Economics from Brigham Young University.