Faculty Advisory Board

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita 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 Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics. A graduate of the University of Chicago (AB ’97), she earned her MA in Classics and PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at UChicago since 2008. Her scholarship explores questions of value, aspiration, and moral development, and she is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, On Anger, and Open Socrates. In addition to her academic work, Callard is widely known for her contributions to public philosophy through essays, lectures, podcasts, and commentary in outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Point.

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).

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.

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.

Genevieve Lakier teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on the social media platforms.

Genevieve has an AB from Princeton University, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an MA and PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. Between 2006 and 2008, she was an Academy Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. After law school, she clerked for Judge Leonard B. Sand of the Southern District of New York and Judge Martha C. Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before joining the faculty, Genevieve taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law.

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.