CDE extends a warm welcome to three new affiliates, Lindsay Jacobs, Hyunseung Kang, and Jeffrey Smith.
Jacobs joined the La Follette School of Public Affairs in January 2018 as an assistant professor. Jacobs specializes in labor economics, particularly among older populations, and her research focuses on retirement preparedness and the interactions among health, jobs tasks, and supply decisions. Before her time at La Follette, Jacobs was an economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. In 2015, she received her doctorate in economics from UW–Madison, where she was a graduate student affiliate at CDE.
Hyunseung Kang, assistant professor in the statistics department, came to UW–Madison in 2017 after completing an NSF mathematical science postdoctoral research fellowship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Kang’s research focuses on developing theory and methods to analyze causal relationships in large observational data by leveraging instrumental variables, econometrics, high dimensional inference, and causal inference. Kang is particularly interested in applications to genetics, epidemiology, health policy research, and economics. He completed his PhD in statistics at Wharton in 2015.
Smith, a senior scholar of labor and public economics, joined the economics department in January from the University of Michigan, where he had spent the previous 12 years. Smith was hired as part of the poverty cluster, organized by the Institute for Research on Poverty. Smith’s research has primarily focused on experimental and non-experimental methods for evaluating interventions, with particular application to social and educational programs. Smith received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1996.
CDE also welcomes Sherry Huhn Gotzler who joined the center in March as the office administrator. Huhn Gotzler filled the position previously held by Carol Tetzlaff, a long-time CDE employee who retired in February after 21 years of service. Huhn Gotzler will help with travel arrangements and reimbursements for affiliates, staff, and guest visitors, and will manage purchases and the coordination of the CDE office.