Faculty & Staff Directory

Gabrielle Adams

Gabrielle
Adams

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Business Administration, and Psychology

Gabrielle Adams is an associate professor of public policy and business administration at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and in the Darden School of Business’s Leadership and Organizational Behavior area. Adams studies the processes and dynamics that give rise to ‘good’ decisions, policies and conditions in organizations.

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Maura Austin

Maura
Austin

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Maura Austin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She studies person perception, motivation, social judgment and decision making, and moral character judgment. 

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Daphna Bassock

Daphna
Bassok

Professor of Education and Public Policy

Daphna Bassok is professor of education and public policy at the University of Virginia and associate director of EdPolicyWorks, a collaboration between the School of Education and Human Development and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Her research focuses on early childhood education policy and efforts to improve early childhood education at scale, particularly policies aimed at supporting the early childhood education workforce.

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Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi

Jazmin
Brown-Iannuzzi

Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Policy

Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi is an associate professor of psychology and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Brown-Iannuzzi's research seeks to understand why social group disparities may persist and, in some cases, grow.

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Eileen Chou

Eileen
Chou

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; Batten Family Bicentennial Teacher-Scholar Leadership Professor of Public Policy; Professor of Public Policy and Psychology

Eileen Chou, associate dean for academic affairs and Batten Family Bicentennial Teacher-Scholar Leadership Professor of Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, researches the organizational, social, and psychological forces that shape individual and group behavior in organizational settings.

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Benjamin Converse

Benjamin
Converse

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Psychology

Benjamin Converse is an associate professor of public policy and psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Department of Psychology. His research focuses on motivation, social judgment, problem solving and decision making. He teaches courses related to leadership and negotiations.

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Leora Friedberg

Leora
Friedberg

Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Leora Friedberg is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the Batten School and an associate professor and Vice Chair at UVA's Department of Economics. Her focus is on labor economics, including research on social security, aging and retirement economic impacts.

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Gerald Higginbotham

Gerald
Higginbotham

Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology

Gerald Higginbotham is an assistant professor of public policy and psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Utilizing social and cultural psychological insights, Higginbotham researches the imprint of history on people’s modern social perceptions and policy attitudes, and the psychological underpinnings of how people perceive history and its consequences. 

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Charles_Holt_H.jpg

Charles
Holt

Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Charles Holt is a professor of economics and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the A. Willis Robertson Professor of Political Economy at the University of Virginia. Holt is also the current Director of the Experimental Economics Laboratory at Virginia, where he develops and programs the web-based VeconLab experiments that are widely used for teaching and research with over 90,000 participant logins per year.

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Phuong Le

Phuong
Le

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Phuong Le is a postdoctoral researcher at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She studies the psychology of how people motivate themselves and others to obtain valued long-term goals. 

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Molly Lipscomb

Molly
Lipscomb

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics; Director of the Center for Social Innovation

Molly Lipscomb is an associate professor of public policy and economics at the Batten School and the Director of the Center for Social Innovation at the University of Virginia.  Lipscomb’s research focuses primarily on environmental issues in developing countries and adaptation to lack of centralized health and sanitation services. 

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Isaac Mbiti

Isaac
Mbiti

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics

Isaac M. Mbiti is an associate professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. His research has focused broadly on African economic development with particular interests in examining the role of education policies such as free primary education and teacher performance pay programs. Mbiti's ongoing research projects in East and West Africa evaluate various policies that aim to improve the livelihoods of African youth through training programs.

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Noah Myung

Noah
Myung

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics

Noah Myung is an associate professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. He is an experimental and behavioral economist with research interests in game theory, organizational economics, and financial economics. Myung's current research deals with equilibrium selection in coordination games as well as information sharing between competitors

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John Pepper

John
Pepper

Professor of Economics and Public Policy

John V. Pepper is a professor of economics and public policy at the Batten School and a professor of economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia. His work examines identification problems that arise when evaluating a wide range of public policy questions including such subjects as health and disability programs, welfare policies (e.g., SNAP), and drug and crime policies.

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Dan Player

Daniel
W.
Player

Associate Professor of Public Policy

Dan Player is an associate professor of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. His research focuses on issues in education policy. His work has examined questions such as how teacher ability is recognized and rewarded in schools, whether teacher performance predicts turnover, and how teachers respond to working conditions.

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Chris Ruhm

Christopher
J.
Ruhm

Professor of Public Policy and Economics

Christopher J. Ruhm is a professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Ruhm’s recent research has focused on the role of government policies in helping parents with young children balance the competing needs of work and family life, and on examining how various aspects of health are produced – including the growth and sources of drug poisoning deaths in the United States, the rise in obesity and the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and health.

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Abigail Scholer

Abigail
Scholer

Batten Family Bicentennial Distinguished Leadership Professor of Public Policy; Professor of Public Policy and Psychology
Garrett Hall

Abigail Scholer is Batten Family Bicentennial Distinguished Leadership Professor of Public Policy and professor of public policy and psychology at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. Scholer studies fundamental and basic processes related to goal pursuit, decision-making, social regulation, motivated social cognition, and behavior change, with an aim for understanding how these basic processes can be leveraged to address societal challenges and improve people’s lives.

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Jay Shimshack

Jay
Shimshack

Professor of Public Policy and Economics

Jay Shimshack is a professor of public policy and economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Shimshack's research focuses on environmental regulation, environmental economics, corporate social behavior, and applied microeconomics for public policy. 

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William Shobe

William
Shobe

Research Professor Emeritus of Public Policy

William Shobe is research professor of public policy at the Batten School and the Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at UVA’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Shobe's current research includes emission market and auction design, environmental federalism, improved economic modeling of Virginia’s economy, state economic development incentives and state economic forecasting.

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Sophie Trawalter

Sophie
Trawalter

Batten Family Bicentennial Teacher-Scholar Leadership Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Psychology

Sophie Trawalter, Batten Family Bicentennial Teacher-Scholar Leadership Professor of Public Policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, studies phenomena related to social diversity, specifically how people navigate intergroup contact and intergroup contexts, with a particular focus on how people develop competencies and learn to thrive in diverse spaces.

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Sarah Turner

Sarah
Turner

University Professor of Economics, Education and Public Policy

Sarah Turner is a University Professor of economics, education and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Souder Family Endowed Professor. Much of her research focuses on post-secondary education, where she explores the intersection of education and economics policies.

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Timothy Wilson

Timothy
Wilson

Sherrell J. Aston Professor Emeritus of Psychology

Timothy Wilson is Sherrell J Aston Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson has conducted research showing the limits of introspection as a source of self-knowledge, the dangers of engaging in too much introspection about why we do what we do, the difficulty in predicting our future emotional reactions, as well as the pleasures we can derive from “just thinking.” He has also conducted research on applications of social psychology to address social problems.

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James Wyckoff

James
H.
Wyckoff

Professor Emeritus of Education and Public Policy

Jim Wyckoff is a professor emeritus of education and public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and the Memorial Professor of Education and Policy. Wyckoff focuses on issues of teacher labor markets, teacher preparation, recruitment, assessment and retention. His current research examines how teacher assessment and evaluation systems influence the quality of teaching, especially in traditionally low performing classrooms. 

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