Monday, October 21, 2019
9:00 a.m.–6:30 p.m.
Registration opens at 8:30 a.m.
Low Memorial Library, Columbia University

VIEW PANEL VIDEOS

The following is a list of speakers for the Green New Deal conference. Information about new speakers will be added as it becomes available.

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Sandy Baum

Sandy Baum is a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute and professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College. Dr. Baum earned her BA in sociology at Bryn Mawr College, where she is currently a member of the board of trustees, and her PhD in economics at Columbia University. She has written and spoken extensively on issues relating to college access, college pricing, student aid policy, student debt, affordability, and other aspects of higher education finance. Dr. Baum has also co-authored the College Board’s annual publications Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing since 2002. Through the College Board and the Brookings Institution, she has chaired major study groups that released proposals for reforming federal and state student aid. She is the principal researcher on the Urban Institute’s website on college affordability, and her recent work includes Urban Institute briefs on Federal Work Study, Parent PLUS loans, and college endowments. She is the author of Student Debt: Rhetoric and Realities of Higher Education Financing (2016) and co-author with Harry Holzer of Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students (2017).

David A. Bergeron

David A. Bergeron is a senior fellow for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress (CAP). He previously served as CAP’s first vice president for postsecondary education policy. At CAP, Bergeron has written on a variety of higher education issues, including releasing a series of papers calling for “College for All” in early 2015. He has also written extensively on higher education accountability and accreditation, including, most recently, a chapter in Accreditation on the Edge (2018). Prior to joining the center, Bergeron served as the acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the US Department of Education, as well as the deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning, and innovation for the Office of Postsecondary Education. Bergeron received his BA in political science and sociology from the University of Rhode Island and worked for a bank in consumer loans at the beginning of his career. Currently based in his home state of Rhode Island, he volunteers in a variety of ways for the University of Rhode Island and College Unbound, a recently accredited degree completion college in Providence. 

Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, and a member of President Obama’s economic team. Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Bernstein was a senior economist and the director of the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute, and between 1995 and 1996, he held the post of deputy chief economist at the US Department of Labor. Bernstein holds a PhD in social welfare from Columbia University and is the author and co-author of numerous books for both popular and academic audiences, including his latest book, The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity. Bernstein has published extensively in various venues, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the American Prospect. He is an on-air commentator for the cable station CNBC and a contributor to the PostEverything blog by the Washington Post.

Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce is a Texas-based author, journalist, and film producer. He has been writing about energy and politics for three decades, during which he has covered everything from Enron’s bankruptcy and the digitization of drilling rigs to nuclear energy and the future of batteries. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Post, and National Review.  He is the author of five books including Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong and Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. He is also the producer of a new feature-length documentary film, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World. His sixth book, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, will be published in March 2020.

James C. Capretta

James C. Capretta is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies health care, entitlement, and US budgetary policy, as well as global trends in aging, health, and retirement programs. Capretta spent more than 16 years in public service before joining AEI. As an associate director at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004, he was responsible for all health care, Social Security, welfare, labor, and education issues. Capretta is also a senior adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center and has served on the advisory board of the National Institute for Health Care Management since 2011. He is a contributor to RealClearPolicy, and has been widely published in newspapers, magazines, and trade journals. Capretta has an MA in public policy studies from Duke University and a BA in government from the University of Notre Dame.

Dan Carol

Dan Carol is a director in the Milken Institute Center for Financial Markets, expanding the organization’s work with local governments and stakeholders to foster best practice implementation of the Opportunity Zones Initiative and accelerate community and regional innovation. Prior to joining the Milken Institute, Carol worked for Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom of California, directing the state’s Opportunity Zones working group and serving on the executive committee of the US Climate Alliance, a bipartisan alliance of 24 states implementing the Paris Agreement. Carol previously served the Obama Administration as a member of the US Department of Energy State Energy Advisory Board and led efforts to create the West Coast Infrastructure Exchange, a 2015 winner of the Harvard Ash Center’s Innovations in American Government Award. Outside of government, Carol co-founded two clean energy acceleration groups (the Apollo Alliance and the Clean Economy Network) and founded CTSG, a 70-person online civic engagement company and software company, sold in 2004. Carol has also served as a US Presidential Management Fellow, a senior campaign advisor to the Clinton-Gore 1992 and Obama-Biden 2008 campaigns, and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Carol holds a BA from the University of Michigan and a master’s in regional planning from the University of North Carolina.

Matthew Continetti

Matthew Continetti is founding editor of the Washington Free Beacon and a contributing editor to National Review. He is the author of two books, The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine (2006) and The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star (2009). His articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast. He graduated from Columbia University in 2013 with a degree in history, and lives in Virginia with his family.

Alexis Crow

Alexis Crow is a senior fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy and leads the Geopolitical Investing practice at PwC, helping leading companies and asset managers to capitalize on dislocations in order to profit and expand around the globe. Previously, Dr. Crow was managing director at New York–based G2 Investment Group, where she was responsible for developing investment strategies for the firm, and for providing counsel on geopolitical issues across asset classes. Prior to joining G2, Dr. Crow was an expert at Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs), where she led a project on managing risk across cultural boundaries, and which facilitated dialogue between governments, business executives, and thought leaders in key global hotspots. She holds a first class MA in international relations from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, as well as an MS and PhD from the London School of Economics. 

Kate Davidson

Kate Davidson covers US economic policy from the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, where she has written about how fiscal stimulus drives economic growth, what rising deficits mean for the long-term outlook, and how the Federal Reserve has navigated political pressure since the financial crisis. Prior to joining the Wall Street Journal in January 2015, Davidson covered financial regulation and policy for Politico and American Banker, including the implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and the creation of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She has also worked for Congressional Quarterly and the Concord Monitor. 

Max Eden

Max Eden is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Before joining the institute, he was the program manager of the education policy studies department at the American Enterprise Institute. Eden’s research interests include early education, school choice, and federal education policy. He was co-editor, with Frederick M. Hess, of The Every Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools, Systems, and States (2017). Eden’s work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets, such as the Journal of School Choice, Encyclopedia of Education Economics and Finance, Washington Post, US News and World Report, National Review, Claremont Review of Books, and  Weekly Standard. He holds a BA in history from Yale University. 

Jonathan Elkind

Jonathan Elkind is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. Elkind came to the center after a long and distinguished career devoted to energy and environmental policy. From 2009 to 2017, he worked on international energy and climate issues at the US Department of Energy, helping coordinate energy policy in the Obama Administration and leading climate and energy programs with key global partners. Previously, he founded Eastlink Consulting, where he guided corporate and nonprofit clients on commercial energy projects in Europe and Eurasia, and served as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, researching international energy security issues. Early in his career, Elkind focused on energy, environment, and economic issues in the post-Soviet nations in a variety of posts with the Joint Global Change Research Institute, the US National Security Council, the Office of the Vice President of the United States, the Department of Energy, and the Council on Environmental Quality. Elkind holds an MBA from the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, an MA in Russian history and certificate in Soviet studies from the W. Averell Harriman Institute, and a BA with distinction in history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is also a distinguished associate with the Energy Futures Initiative. 

Erik German

Erik German is a senior fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy as well as a producer at Retro Report, a news organization that produces short documentaries on pressing issues. Previously, he worked as a roving national correspondent and producer for The Daily, News Corp’s iPad news publication, and was an award-winning foreign correspondent for GlobalPost based in North Africa and Brazil. He began his career at Newsday, covering politics, local corruption, and crime. While at Newsday, he received a New York Press Club Award for investigative reporting on home loan fraud. 

Sherry Glied

Sherry Glied is Dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In 1989–2013, she was professor of health policy and management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and in July 2010–August 2012, she served as assistant secretary for planning and evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. She had previously served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992–1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance, and served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking. Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. She is the author of Chronic Condition (1998); Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the US since 1950, with Richard Frank (2006) and co-editor, with Peter C. Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Health Economics (2011). Glied holds a BA from Yale, an MA from the University of Toronto, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin

Douglas Holtz-Eakin has a distinguished record as an academic, policy adviser, and strategist.  He is currently the president of the American Action Forum, and most recently was a commissioner on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, chartered by the US Congress to investigate the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. He was the sixth director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) from 2003 to 2005. Following his tenure at CBO, Dr. Holtz-Eakin was the director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and the Paul A. Volcker Chair in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.  During 2007 and 2008, he was director of domestic and economic policy for the John McCain presidential campaign. Dr. Holtz-Eakin serves on the boards of the Tax Foundation and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Stephanie Kelton

Stephanie Kelton is a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University. She is a leading expert on Modern Monetary Theory and a former chief economist on the US Senate Budget Committee (Democratic staff). She was named by Politico as one of the 50 people most influencing the policy debate in America (2016). Professor Kelton advises policymakers and consults with investment banks and portfolio managers across the globe. She is a regular commentator on national radio and broadcast television. Her highly anticipated book, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and Creating an Economy for the People, will be published in June 2020.

Gillian Lester

Gillian Lester is dean and the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She joined the Law School in 2015 as its fifteenth dean. As a nationally recognized authority on employment law and policy, Lester’s research focuses on exploring workplace intellectual property law, public finance policy, and the design of social insurance laws and regulations. Lester began her teaching career in 1994 at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, where she later became a full professor in 1999. In 2006, Lester joined the Berkeley Law faculty, where—in addition to serving as acting dean from 2012 to 2014—she was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law and the Werner and Mimi Wolfen Research Professor. Lester also co-directed the Berkeley Center for Health, Economic and Family Security and was the Associate Dean for the JD Program and Curricular Planning. She is the author of numerous academic books and articles and is a co-author of Employment Law: Cases and Materials, Sixth Edition, one of the leading casebooks in the field. Lester is also a member of the Executive Committee of the American Association of Law Schools, a member of the American Law Institute, and she served as an adviser to the ALI Restatement of Employment Law. Lester has held external appointments at Harvard Law School as the Sidley Austin Visiting Professor and at the Georgetown University Law Center as a Sloan Fellow and visiting professor. She also held short-term visiting appointments at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, University of Chicago Law School, and Radzyner School of Law Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. Lester holds degrees from Stanford Law School and the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the Law Review. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia.

Costis Maglaras

Costis Maglaras is dean and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He received his BS in electrical engineering from Imperial College, London, and holds MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. An expert in operations research, data analytics and quantitative finance, Maglaras has served as chair of the Decision, Risk, & Operations Division; as faculty director for the Risk Management course administered through Executive Education; and as a member of the Executive Committee of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute. He has received both the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the Dean’s Award for Teaching Innovation. Prior to joining the School in 1998, Maglaras was a research scientist at Canon Research Center America. His research centers on stochastic modeling and data science, with an emphasis on stochastic networks, financial engineering, and quantitative pricing and revenue management. His research has been recognized through the 1999 INFORMS Nicholson Prize for best paper in Operations Research and Management Science and the 2008 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section best research paper award. Outside of the Business School, in 2007, Maglaras helped found Mismi Inc., a financial technology firm that introduced innovative quantitative electronic trading algorithms and transaction analytics tools to the marketplace. He is a frequent consultant to industry, primarily in areas of quantitative finance and electronic trading.

Ioana Marinescu

Ioana Marinescu is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As an economist, she studies the labor market to craft policies that can enhance employment, productivity, and economic security. Dr. Marinescu’s research expertise includes online job search, antitrust and the labor market, the universal basic income, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and employment contracts. Her work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Labor Economics, the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and the Journal of Public Economics. She has testified for policy makers, including the Federal Trade Commission, and has briefed Congressional staff. Her research has been cited in many media outlets, including the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. She writes a monthly op-ed for the French newspaper Liberation.

Richard Richman

Richard Paul Richman is the chairman and founder of the Richman Group and its affiliates. The Richman Group is the seventh largest apartment portfolio owner in the United States according to the National Multi-Housing Council. He is nationally active in the fields of housing and urban development. Richman is a member of the Dean’s Council of Columbia Law School, the Board of Overseers of the Columbia Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Urban Research Institute, and has been a member of the University of Pennsylvania Parents Leadership Board. He is also a trustee of NYU Langone Health System. Richman has supported numerous philanthropic endeavors and organizations through his family foundation, including the establishment of the Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy at Columbia University and the Richman Scholar Fellowship Program at Columbia Law School. He graduated from Columbia University Law School with a JD, Columbia Business School with an MBA, and Syracuse University with a BA in political science.

Margot Sanger-Katz

Margot Sanger-Katz is a domestic correspondent at the New York Times, where she covers health care for The Upshot. She is also a regular panelist on Kaiser Health News’s What the Health? podcast. She was previously a reporter at National Journal and the Concord Monitor, and an editor at Legal Affairs and the Yale Alumni Magazine. In 2014, she completed a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University. Her recent work focuses on health policy, but previous stories have included New Hampshire’s militia movement, the John McCain presidential campaign, Indiana’s fight over daylight saving time, and the death penalty.

Robert Smith

Robert Smith is a host of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, a show about the forces that shape the global economy. He has been holding a microphone for 30 years, reporting at public-radio stations across the western United States, then for NPR in New York City. In that time, Robert has covered education, the environment, natural disasters, un-natural disasters (like presidential campaigns), and now business and economics. He won the Peabody Award in 2017 for his coverage of the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal and is currently a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University.

Albert Wenger

 Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures (USV). Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College with a BA in economics and computer science and holds a PhD in information technology from MIT.

Steffie Woolhandler

Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, is a primary care doctor, a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York School at Hunter College, and a lecturer in medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she was formerly professor of medicine. A native of Louisiana, she graduated from LSU Medical School in New Orleans and completed an internal medicine residency at Cambridge Hospital. She also holds an MPH degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Woolhandler completed a research fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellowship at the Institute of Medicine in Washington, DC. She has published more than 200 journal articles, reviews, chapters, and books on health policy and is a leading advocate of single-payer national health insurance for the United States. She has served as an advisor to several political leaders, most recently Senator Bernie Sanders. In 1986, she co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program.

Pierre Yared

Pierre Yared is the MUTB Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School and Co-Director of the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy. His research, which has been published in leading academic journals, focuses on macroeconomic policy, political economy, and growth. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. Yared teaches Global Economic Environment, a core MBA course in macroeconomics for which he received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York. Yared received his BA in economics from Harvard University and his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.