Green New Deal Conference Speakers

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Erik German is a senior producer for Retro Report, a documentary series published by PBS, The New York Times, Vox, Vice and other outlets. He is currently co-producing a feature-length documentary on evictions in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic.

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.

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.

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.

Gillian Lester is Dean of 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.

Costis Maglaras is the 16th Dean of Columbia Business School, and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business at Columbia University. Costis received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London, in 1990, and his MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1991 and 1998, respectively. He joined Columbia Business School in 1998, when he joined the Decision, Risk and Operations Division.

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.

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. The firm's portfolio includes approximately 1,400 housing properties, containing nearly 110,000 apartment units located in 49 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Saipan. The firm is headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, and has regional offices throughout the nation.

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.

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, MD, MPH, is a primary care doctor, a distinguished professor of public health at the City University of New York School and 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.

Pierre Yared is the MUTB Professor of International Business, Senior Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs, and Vice Dean for Executive Education at Columbia Business School. His research, which has been published in leading academic journals, focuses on macroeconomic policy and political economy. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor of the American Economic Review. Yared teaches Global Economic Environment, a Core MBA course in macroeconomics for which he received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.