• Fellows 2011-2012
• Women and Public Policy Program Fellowship
• Past WAPPP Fellows

Fellows 2011-2012

May Al-Dabbagh

Founder and Director of the Gender and Public Policy Program, Dubai School of Government
May Al-Dabbagh is the Founder and Director of the Gender and Public Policy Program at Dubai School of Government where she has taught and published on a variety of topics including cross-cultural and social/organizational psychology, theory and method in assessing the relationship between the self and context, the psychological effects of globalization, and cultural and gender differences in leadership, decision-making, and job-related outcomes. She has publications in Arabic and English, and her work has been featured in over 40 local, regional, and international media outlets. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Al-Dabbagh will focus on the psychological consequences of globalization in the countries of the Gulf Cooperative Council and the ways in which globalization creates new gendered patterns and outcomes in negotiation. Al-Dabbagh earned her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford and her B.A. degree in psychology from Harvard University.

Lakshmi Balachandra

Former Graduate Fellow, Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School
Lakshmi Balachandra is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration. Her research interests include entrepreneurship, decision-making, trust, negotiation, and improvisation. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Organization Studies at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, where she was awarded the 2011 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation on "Pitching Trustworthiness: Cues for trust in early-stage investment decision-making." During her fellowship at WAPPP, Balachandra is examining gender differences in early-stage entrepreneurship rates and the related career impacts that such gender-based choices have on women’s entrepreneurship and the success rates of women-owned enterprises. She holds an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and an A.B. in Environmental Studies and Economics from the University of Chicago.

Kathleen Coyne-McCoy

Executive Director, Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending
Kathleen Coyne-McCoy is the Executive Director for the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending (CAPS), which was founded in 2010 to promote accountability and transparency in corporate political spending. Previously, Coyne-McCoy served as a Regional Director for EMILY’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice, Democratic women to federal, state and local office. She has designed and implemented training programs for women candidates seeking political office and has helped elect over 100 women to state and local office. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Coyne-McCoy will develop a training manual and conduct trainings for the members of the From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program. Her training will focus on topics such as strategic steps in making the decision to run, getting ready to run, building a campaign plan, creating campaign message, working with the media, and fundraising. Coyne-McCoy holds a M.S.W. from Rhode Island College and a B.A. in Social Work from Providence College.

Katja Kaufmann

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and IGIER, Bocconi University
Katja Kaufmann is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Her research interests include development and labor economics, applied econometrics, the economics of education and gender. She has taught courses in development economics, applied microeconometrics, and macroeconomics. In 2010 she won the CESifo Distinguished Affiliate Award for the Economics of Education. While at WAPPP, Kaufmann is examining educational choices and returns on the labor and marriage markets, particularly looking at parents’ and youths’ expectations about labor market and marriage market returns to schooling. She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Julian Jamison

Senior Economist with the Center for Behavioral Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston; Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School
Julian Jamison is a Senior Economist with the Center for Behavioral Economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and a Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. During his fellowship at WAPPP, Jamison will complete work on two reproductive health projects (in Uganda and Tanzania); continue work on a female entrepreneurship program (in northern Uganda); and begin work on an urban youth sustainable transformation project (in Liberia). He is particularly interested in differential effects of time preferences and future orientation on decision making. Previously, Jamison taught in the Economics Department at Yale University, the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a M.S. and B.S. in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.

Daniel Manne

Recent graduate of the LL.M. program, Harvard Law School
Daniel Manne recently completed a LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where his studies focused on sex equality and policies addressing violence against women. His LL.M. thesis examined the inadequate state response to violence against women and made a number of recommendations for domestic violence reform in the United States. During his fellowship at WAPPP, Manne is turning his thesis into a book that will serve as a comprehensive policy guide for domestic violence reform in the U.S. Beginning in the fall of 2012, Manne has accepted as position as Postdoctoral Associate in the Program on Ethics in Public Life at Cornell University. Previously, Manne spent several years as a practicing attorney at Foley Hoag LLP in Boston where he worked pro bono on many domestic violence cases. He also holds a J.D. from the Boston University School of Law.

Olga Shurchkov

Assistant Professor of Economics, Wellesley College
Olga Shurchkov is Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College. Her research interests include behavioral and experimental economics and the economics of discrimination, with a particular focus on labor market discrimination and gender differences. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Shurchkov is researching the beauty premium in the labor market and how it potentially interacts with gender-based discrimination in the United States and other countries. She will also continue her work on gender differences in representation and earnings across various job types in the labor market. Shurchkov also serves as a Visiting Professor in Finance and Economics at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alexandra van Geen

Doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School
Alexandra van Geen is a doctoral candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Alexandra’s research will focus on gender differences in individual judgment and decision making, the design of interventions to improve diversity and experimental economics. Prior to beginning her program at Harvard Kennedy School, Alexandra was a political assistant to members of parliament in the Netherlands, where she was responsible for parliamentarians’ speeches on economic and financial matters and on gender equality. She holds a Master of Philosophy in Economics from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a B.A. in Social Science from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Paula Caplan

WAPPP Associate

Director of the Voices of Diversity Study
Paula Caplan is a clinical and research psychologist and Director the Voices of Diversity Study based at the DuBois Institute at Harvard. Previously, she was a Full Professor of Applied Psychology and head of two graduate programs (one of which included the Feminist stream in Community Psychology) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto, as well as Head of the OISE Centre for Women’s Studies in Education. She also taught in the University of Toronto's undergraduate Women's Studies Programme. More recently, she served as a lecturer in Harvard’s Psychology Department and in the Program on Women, Gender and Sexuality. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Caplan will continue her work on two projects: the Voices of Diversity study and follow-up from recent her book on returning women and men veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, When Johnny and Jame Come Marching Home: How All of Us Can Help Veterans. Paula holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. in Psychology from Duke University and an A.B. in English from Radcliffe College.

Sreedhari Desai

WAPPP Associate

Assistant Professor at the Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Sreedhari Desai is an Assistant Professor at the Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a research fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her research investigates how individuals behave in organizations, with a focus on ethical decision making, fairness and gender diversity. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Sreedhari’s research, joint with Iris Bohnet and Aaron Dhir, examines the wisdom of regulatory boards in increasingly requiring organizations to disclose how they go about making hires, particularly in the upper echelons of organizations. In this project, Sreedhari and her coauthors study whether counter to the popular conjecture, requiring recruiters to disclose their choice of a hire will serve as a vehicle for justifying why they chose a male over a female candidate. Sreedhari holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from the University of Utah, an M.S. in Finance, also from the University of Utah, and a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.

Pinar Keskin

WAPPP Associate

Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College
Pinar Keskin is Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, where her work focuses on environmental and development economics. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Keskin will continue her work on gender, inheritance rights and marriage in India. Previously, Keskin was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and held the Giorgio Ruffolo Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sustainability Science at the Center for International Development at HKS. Keskin holds a Ph.D., an M.A. and an M.Phil in Economics from Yale University and a B.A. in Economics from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.

Martina Viarengo

WAPPP Associate

Assistant Professor, International Economics Department, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva
Martina Viarengo, an Italian citizen, is Assistant Professor in the department of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Viarengo is a specialist in applied microeconomics and development, and her research focuses on comparative education policy, gender and migration. During her fellowship at WAPPP, Viarengo will continue to examine education policy, gender gaps and labor market outcomes in the OECD and developing countries to better understand how to reduce poverty and inequality. Previously, she was a Research Economist with the Education and Skills Program of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. In 2009 Viarengo was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and named Newton International Fellow by the British Academy, Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, a Master’s Degree from Northwestern University and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Turin.