Faculty Advisory Board

Ethan is the Dean and Sydney Stein Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and a Faculty Associate in the University of Chicago Department of Political Science.

A leading political scientist whose research applies game theoretic models to the study of conflict, political violence, national security, and electoral politics, he has also written extensively on methodological issues in the social sciences. He writes and advises leaders in the public and private sectors on both national security matters and issues at the intersection of technology and society.

Prior to assuming the role of dean in 2024, Bueno de Mesquita served as Interim Dean and Deputy Dean of the Harris School since 2011, as chair of the Pearson Institute Advisory Council, and as co-chair of Harris’ Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board. He is a member of the board of directors of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. Additionally, he served on the steering committee responsible for establishing the PhD in Political Economy and was a member of the Obama Presidential Center Faculty Partnership Advisory Committee.

He is the author or co-author of Political Economy for Public Policy, Theory and Credibility, and Thinking Clearly with Data (all from Princeton University Press) as well as many articles in both political science and economics. He has also written for outlets such as Foreign Policy, the Boston Review, the Harvard Business Review, War on the Rocks, the Chicago Tribune, the National Interest, and others. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace.

Before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 2007, Bueno de Mesquita was a faculty member in the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis and was a Lady Davis Fellow and visiting faculty member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Center for the Study of Rationality and Department of Political Science. Ethan is an alumnus of the University of Chicago, AB’96, and earned his MA (2000) and PhD (2003) in political science from Harvard University.

Agnes Callard is a Professor in Philosophy. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her PhD from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.

Her selected publications include:

Open Socrates (2025) reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, TLS, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Psychology Today, and The Telegraph.

Aspiration (2017); (i) reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement by Adam Bales; (ii) Reviewed in On Riding the Dragon by Katherine October Matthews; (iii) Reviewed in Philosophical Quarterly by Robert J. Hartman; (iv) reviewed in the New Yorker by Joshua Rothman; (v) reviewed in Essays in Philosophy by Krista Karbowski Thomason

“Transformative Activity in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend,” in Transformative Experience, ed. John Schwenkler and Enoch Lambert (Oxford University Press, 2020)

"Aristotle on Deliberation," in the Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang and Kurt Sylvan (2020)Ignorance and Akrasia-Denial in the Protagoras (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy vol. 47)

"Enkratēs Phronimos" (Archiv für Geschichte Der Philosophie 99, no. 1, 2017)

"Everyone Desires the Good: Socrates' Protreptic Theory of Desire," Review of Metaphysics 70, no. 4 (2017)

"The Reason to Be Angry Forever," in The Moral Psychology of Anger, ed. Owen Flanagan and Myisha Cherry (2017; part of Rowman and Littlefield's Moral Psychology of the Emotions series, series editor Mark Alfano)

"Proleptic Reasons" (Oxford Studies in Meta-Ethics, vol. 11)

"The Weaker Reason" (Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 22)

"Liberal Education and the Possibility of Valuational Progress," Social Philosophy and Policy 34, no. 2 (2017)

Nicholas Epley is the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science, and Director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research, at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He studies social cognition—how thinking people think about other thinking people—to understand why smart people so routinely misunderstand each other.  He teaches an ethics and wellbeing course to MBA students called Designing a Good Life. His research has been featured by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public Radio, among many others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation.  He has been awarded the 2008 Theoretical Innovation Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the 2011 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science, and the 2018 Career Trajectory Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.  Epley was named a "professor to watch" by the Financial Times, one of the "World's Best 40 under 40 Business School Professors" by Poets and Quants, and one of the 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics by Ethisphere.  He is the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want (2014), and A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection (2026).

Bridget Fahey is an expert in constitutional law and the law of data. Her work on federalism documents and theorizes the unexpected ways the federal government and states interact and the unorthodox legal tools they use to structure their joint projects. Her research on data focuses on the legal and technical rules that structure the government’s access to and use of data, and more broadly the manner in which the public law of data differs from the law governing other forms of power. Professor Fahey is an affiliated scholar the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute and Co-Director of the Institute’s Data Ecology Research Initiative.

Professor Fahey’s recent co-authored article, Layered Constitutionalism, 124 Colum. L. Rev. 1295 (2024), identifies and theorizes a largely hidden body of federal constitutional rules that shape state structural choices. Her prior article, Coordinated Rulemaking and Cooperative Federalism’s Administrative State, 132 Yale L.J. 1213 (2023), argues that cooperative federalism programs have given rise to a distinctive administrative state—with forms of administrative action and legal frameworks that diverge in important respects from ordinary federal and state administrative law. And an earlier article, Federalism by Contract, 129 Yale L.J. 2326 (2020), revealed the federal government and states longstanding use of contract-like instruments to structure intergovernmental programs and transact in a wide range of governmental powers. Before joining the Chicago faculty, her article Consent Procedures and American Federalism, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1561 (2015), identified and theorized the federal government’s practice of using cooperative federalism programs to intervene in and reshape state and local governing processes.

Professor Fahey also leads interdisciplinary work on the law of data, focusing particularly on government stewardship of private data. Her forthcoming co-authored article, The Structural Law of Data, develops a new account of data’s structural law—the processes, institutional arrangements, transparency rules, and control mechanisms that shape the federal government’s access to, and use of, private data. It builds on a prior article, Data Federalism, 135 Harv. L. Rev. 1107 (2022), which uncovers an extensive intergovernmental market in private data exchanged by federal, state, and local governments, and the unusual cross-governmental bureaucracies that govern that market. Another forthcoming co-authored article, The Law of Information States: Evidence from China and the United States, theorizes how law can be used to combat government misinformation and introduces the idea of “information federalism.” Professor Fahey’s work helps form the basis of interdisciplinary research funded by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, where she serves as a co-director of the Data Ecology Research Initiative.

Professor Fahey received a BA in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Before joining the faculty, she was a litigator at the Washington DC office of WilmerHale, held a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was a law clerk on the DC Circuit and on the Supreme Court of the United States for Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Earlier in her career, Professor Fahey worked as a management consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and Berlin.

She teaches 1L Contracts and Constitutional Law, co-coordinates the Public Law Workshop, and has taught informal Greenberg Seminars on eclectic topics including Free Speech on Campus, Space Law, Order Without Law, and others.

Nick Feamster is Neubauer Professor of Computer Science and Faculty Director of Research at the Data Science Institute. Previously, he was a full professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, where he directed the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP); prior to Princeton, he was a full professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech.

Before joining the faculty at Princeton, he was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He was an early-stage employee at Looksmart (acquired by AltaVista), where he wrote the company’s first web crawler; and at Damballa, where he helped design the company’s first botnet-detection algorithm.

Nick is an ACM Fellow. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His other honors include the Technology Review 35 “Top Young Innovators Under 35” award, the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Faculty Fellowship, the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize, and award papers at ACM SIGCOMM (network-level behavior of spammers), the SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference (measuring Web performance bottlenecks), and award papers at USENIX Security (circumventing web censorship using Infranet, web cookie analysis) and USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation (fault detection in router configuration, software-defined networking). His seminal work on the Routing Control Platform won the USENIX Test of Time Award for its influence on Software Defined Networking.

Nick is an avid distance runner, having completed nearly 20 marathons, including Boston, New York, and Chicago, as well as the Comrades Marathon, an iconic ultra-marathon in South Africa. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Wendy L. Freedman is the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and a world-renowned observational cosmologist. Her pioneering work measuring the expansion rate of the universe has transformed our understanding of cosmology and the age, size, and evolution of the universe.

Freedman is best known for leading the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, which determined the Hubble constant with unprecedented precision. Her research continues to focus on refining measurements of the universe’s expansion and addressing one of modern astrophysics’ most significant challenges, the “Hubble tension.”

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Freedman has received numerous honors, including the Gruber Cosmology Prize, the National Medal of Science, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Before joining the University of Chicago in 2015, she served as Director of the Carnegie Observatories and the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

Robert H. Gertner has been on the Chicago Booth faculty since 1986. His research interests include strategic decision-making, corporate finance, organization structure, theory of the firm, and social enterprises. He has published papers in numerous scholarly journals including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, and the Yale Law Journal. He is co-author, with colleagues Douglas Baird and Randy Picker, of Game Theory and the Law. Gertner teaches Perspectives on Capitalism and New Social Ventures. 

Gertner is also the John Edwardson Faculty Director of the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation.

Gertner is chair of the Board of Trustees of NORC at the University of Chicago, a national organization devoted to large-scale social research in public interest. He was a deputy dean at Chicago Booth from 2012-2017.

Gertner received a bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1981 and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. He worked as a consultant for AT&T prior to attending MIT.

Deborah Gorman-Smith, PhD, is chief strategist for community engagement and partnerships for the University of Chicago and the Emily Klein Gidwitz Professor and dean of the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. For more than 20 years, she served as faculty director of the Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention, a Center devoted to studying and stemming the underlying causes of youth violence through evidence-based, collaborative interventions that focus on families and communities, linking them with schools, the justice system, social service agencies, and policymakers. 

Throughout her career, Professor Gorman-Smith has focused on building scientific knowledge to understand the etiology, developmental impact, and prevention of youth violence. Conducting both longitudinal developmental studies and large-scale randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effect of family-based, school-based, and community-level preventive interventions. Gorman-Smith’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and several foundations. 

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Gorman-Smith was a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Gorman-Smith is a past president of the Society for Prevention Research and has served on other state, national, and international committees, including the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is an elected fellow of the Society for Prevention Research, the American Society of Criminology, and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Gorman-Smith received her PhD in clinical-developmental psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago and master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Northern Illinois University.

Kimberly Kay Hoang is Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. 

Her research examines deal making in frontier and emerging economies. 

Dr. Hoang is the author of two books. Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press 2022). This book provides a behind-the-scenes look at how the rich and powerful use offshore shell corporations to conceal their wealth and make themselves richer. Drawing on rich interview data this book uncovers the mechanics behind the invisible, mundane networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers who facilitate the illicit movement of wealth across borders and around the globe. Spiderweb Capitalism is the winner of five distinguished book awards from the Association of American Publishers and the American Sociological Association. 

Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California Press 2015). This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of seven distinguished book awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Association for Asian Studies.

She received the 2020 Lewis A Coser Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Sociological Theory— a mid-career award for Theoretical Agenda Setting. Her books and articles have been awarded over 26 prizes from several different professional associations. In addition to her research, she is the winner of the 2018 Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Teaching at the University of Chicago. 

Her work has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Gender & Society, Sociological Theory, City & Community, Contexts, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her peer reviewed journal articles have won over 14 prizes and honorable mentions from the Sociologists for Women in Society, Vietnam Scholars Group, and the American Sociological Association: Section on Global & Transnational Sociology, Section on Race, Gender and Class, Section on Sociology of Sex & Gender, Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment, Section on Asia and Asian America, and the Section on Sexualities.

Dwight N. Hopkins is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor.

He graduated from Groton (Boarding) School and Harvard University (BA).

Professor Hopkins initiated and managed a 14-country network to think about the practices of building healthy communities and healthy individuals in communities. With representatives from Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, Japan, India, England, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, and the USA, the network forged learning about neighbors through neighbors sharing their cultures. Indeed, in international transactions of business, politics, and religions, one of the greatest challenges is lack of cultural understanding. Restated, cultures facilitate harmony and balance for the purpose of another world is possible in emerging markets. A higher vision and transcendent values glue the global together spiritually with wealth management.

He was Visiting Professor at Renmin (People’s) University, Beijing, China (course on “The History of Western Civilization”) and Visiting Lecturer at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Surrey International Institute, Dalian, China (ten lectures on “China and the West: Cross Cultural Communication”).

Prof. Hopkins is a constructive theologian, meaning he focuses on innovation and people having agency. His classes combine the humanities with wealth. He continues to work on "faith plus wealth equals freedom" -- a practice of fulfilling one's mission while owing no one or no institution anything. His classes include black ownership of wealth, social entrepreneurship, can capitalism do good, black and liberation theologies, and contemporary models of theology.

Maya Krishnan's scholarly work focuses on Kant’s and Hegel’s theology and examines how their theological views can inform our understanding of their overall philosophical systems. One of her projects in this area concerns how Kant’s theories of the divine intellect and the divine will relate to Kant’s broader accounts of cognition and volition. Her contemporary work defends views inspired by German Idealist thinkers within current debates in ethics and epistemology. 

Selected publications include:

“Grounding the Highest Good: the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God of Kant's moral argument”, Kant-Studien, forthcoming.

Kant claims that his moral arguments for faith in God’s existence secure faith in a being with traditional divine properties including omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. However, it is unclear how Kant’s moral arguments attain this result. This paper presents a new interpretation of Kant’s moral arguments, the ‘grounding interpretation,’ which shows why moral faith concerns a being with the traditional divine omni-properties. It argues for a connection between moral faith and a metaphysical conception of God as the ground of possibility. While that conception has previously been associated with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Kant’s moral arguments supply it with both a practical justification and a practical interpretation. Recognizing this point enables us to understand why Kant holds that the God of moral faith has the traditional divine properties.

"Over-Intelligibility", Political Philosophy (2025)

Contemporary philosophers have argued that framing new concepts can bring about both moral and epistemic progress. In this paper, I argue that such intelligibility has downsides. This paper introduces the phenomenon of 'over-intelligibility,' which obtains when a concept truly applies and facilitates understanding, yet hinders someone as a knower. This takes place when concepts normalize or detrimentally standardize our epistemic lives. 

“Kant’s Critical Theory of the Best Possible World”, Kantian Review (2020)

Gabriel Richardson Lear (Professor of Philosophy) works on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Her book, Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton, 2004), is about the relationship between morally virtuous action and theoretical contemplation in the happiest life. She is currently writing about Plato's aesthetics and about the status of beauty as an ethical concept in the work of several philosophers. She received her PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University (2001).

Peggy Mason grew up in the Washington DC area and worked in taxidermy at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History during middle and high school. She received her BA in Biology in 1983 and her PhD in Neuroscience in 1987, both from Harvard. After postdoctoral work with Howard Fields at UCSF, she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1992 where she is now Professor of Neurobiology. After 20 years looking at the cellular mechanisms of pain modulation, Dr. Mason turned her energies to the biology of empathy and helping behavior in rats. Dr. Mason wrote a textbook for medical students, Medical Neurobiology, now in its second edition. Dr. Mason directed the Neurobiology graduate program for 10 years, was the inaugural director of the undergraduate Neuroscience major, and currently directs the undergraduate minor in Science Communication and Public Discourse. She has received numerous teaching awards, including the Quantrell Award, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching.

Osborn is a historian of Africa, with a particular interest in precolonial and colonial West Africa. She is currently the Faculty Director of the Senegal study abroad program, and she has also served as co-director of the Committee on African Studies, chair of the College’s British fellowships committee, and on the Faculty Boards of the Center for International Social Science Research and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights. She is also the Faculty Director of the Social Sciences Postdoctoral Teaching Fellows program and an editor of The Journal of African History.

Her first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule, uses gender analysis to investigate the intertwined history of household making and statecraft in Kankan, Upper Guinée (located in Guinea). Other topics on which Osborn has published include the history of technology transfer and diffusion in West Africa; the role of intermediaries in colonial rule, the Anthropocene in Africa; the history and cultural significance of the color red in the Atlantic world; and the relationship in West Africa of containers and mobility. She has also researched the effort by the United States government in the 1950s and 1960s to export the model of the land grant university to Africa.

Osborn earned her A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and Fulbright-Hays fellowships and by the American Council of Learned Societies and Social Science Research council. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Osborn served as the Carl E. Koch Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

Before joining the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago in 2008, Christopher Wild taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1997–2004) and the University of California, Los Angeles (2006–08), and held a visiting professorship at the University of Konstanz in the intervening years. His experience at public universities has given him an appreciation for the complex mission of German departments and the importance of preparing graduate students for a wide range of careers.

His first book, Theater der Keuschheit – Keuschheit des Theaters: Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist (Rombach, 2003), traces the profound transformation of theatricality in German drama from the Baroque to Classicism and highlights the often-overlooked influence of religious thought on Enlightenment literary culture. The bourgeois theater reforms advanced by dramatists such as Gottsched, Lessing, and Schiller, he argues, emerged from the internalization of anti-theatrical sentiments rooted primarily in religious criticism.

His past and current research examines how theology and religion have shaped developments commonly regarded as distinctly modern. His book Descartes’ Meditative Turn: Cartesian Thought as Spiritual Practice (Stanford University Press, 2024) explores why René Descartes adopted a title associated with a predominantly religious genre and considers the implications of that generic affiliation for understanding the practice of Cartesian thought. His next book investigates how reforms of religious media initiated by Martin Luther and others helped lay the foundations for modern media technologies and practices.

He has advised students working on a wide range of topics, including the modernist grotesque, the emergence of the modern lyric paradigm, conversion and Bildung in Enlightenment culture and literature, the diathetics of eighteenth-century literature, the dramaturgy of the imagination in Lessing and Kleist, and anagnorisis and the aesthetics of Realism.

Dr. Woodruff serves as Dean of Students for the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine and is a former Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency. His areas of interest in medical education are professional development and specifically complex problem solving and adaptive behavior. He practices general internal medicine in both the inpatient and outpatient settings.