Dr. Susan Minushkin is the program director for the Better Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Land-use Decision Making (BUILD) Research Network program and has led research, policy, and international development programs for more than twenty years. Previously, she was Vice President for Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning at Making Cents International, Senior Program Director and Chief of Party at Panagora Group, and Program Director at Management Systems International. She has led projects in Asia, Latin America and Africa on monitoring, evaluation, research and learning, democracy and governance, and inclusive development. Before working in international development, Susan was a Professor of International Studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas in Mexico City where she led the Mexico and the World public opinion survey. She received her PhD in political science from Columbia University.

Leah Brooks is Professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University, Director of the Center for Washington Area Studies and co-faculty lead for the BUILD Research Network at the Social Science Research Council. After receiving her PhD from UCLA in 2005, she taught at the University of Toronto and McGill University, and worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her early work examined Business Improvement Districts and land assembly to understand the resolution of collective action problems, analyzed the Community Development Block Grant program to understand the political economy of grant giving at the municipal and sub-municipal levels, and investigated the long-run impacts of streetcar investments in Los Angeles on urban form. Recently she has analyzed whether and why US infrastructure costs have increased, and asked why the redevelopment following Washington, DC’s 1968 civil disturbance took over forty years. She is currently studying the perils and promise of condominiums, the impact of ecommerce on physical retail establishments, and evaluating whether the last hundred years of US federal lawmaking show evidence of increased interest in citizen participation.

Chris Elmendorf is Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Institute for Progress, and a member of the American Law Institute. He is a leading authority on California land-use and housing law and has done widely noted work on public opinion about housing markets and policy. Published in numerous top journals across the fields of law, political science, and economics, his research has shaped legislation and judicial opinions and been covered by major media outlets including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Bloomberg News, and CalMatters. A graduate of Oberlin College and Yale Law School, Elmendorf clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit before joining the UC Davis faculty.

Nicholas Bagley is a law professor at the University of Michigan. In 2020 and 2022, he served as special counsel and then chief legal counsel to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Before joining the law school, he served as an attorney in the Civil Division at the United States Department of Justice. He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

David Broockman is an Associate Professor at the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he serves as the Director of the Berkeley Center for American Democracy. Broockman earned his BA from Yale University in 2011 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. He previously served as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Broockman is the author of over three dozen peer-reviewed scholarly essays about American politics. Broockman’s research has overturned conventional wisdom regarding the nature, extent, and consequences of political polarization in the American public; how political campaigns and organizations can more effectively persuade voters; and how to have productive conversations to bridge divides and reduce prejudice. He has received a number of scholarly awards, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, the American Political Science Association Public Opinion and Voting Behavior Section’s Emerging Scholar Award, the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Research in the Public Interest, the Joseph L. Bernd Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Politics, and the Leamer-Rosenthal Award for Open Social Science. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, and on NPR’s This American Life.

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and natural resources law. In 2022 and 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Demonstrations at the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory and permitting challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2022, Professor Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she was a member of the faculty from 2006 to 2022. She has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. For more details on Professor Klass’s background and publications, please see https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/alexandra-klass.