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Rappaport Institute Staff
Polly O'Brien, who has been the Institute’s assistant director since February 2005, previously was a program manager and administrative assistant at the Institute. Before joining the Institute in 2002, she was a project manager at Sky Dog Technologies, a website design firm in Arlington. She came to that job from the Consensus Building Institute, a conflict and dispute resolution firm in Cambridge where she was webmaster and editor of the organization's newsletter, CBI Reports, and where she assisted in training preparation and project management. O’Brien has also worked for the Boston Natural Areas Fund, where she was curator of an educational study on the history of the Neponset River and oversaw the creation of an exhibit on the Neponset River that traveled to local schools and historical societies. She received an M.A. in classics from Boston University. She can be reached at (617) 495-5091. Email
Nina Tobio is a research assistant at the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government. She received her undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University, and after graduation she worked in economic consulting. Most recently, she received a master’s degree in film studies from Boston University. She can be reached at (617) 495-4214. Email Betsy Donald, Visiting Scholar, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She has degrees in history, environmental studies, planning and geography from McGill, York and Toronto respectively. She teaches and does research on the urban creative economy, with recent publications in Environment and Planning A, the Professional Geographer and the Canadian Journal of Urban Research. She is also a Registered Professional Planner and has consulted on a wide-range of public policy issues for all levels of government. Her most recent report was for Canadian Heritage, Competing for Talent: implications for social and cultural policy in Canadian city-regions (available at www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/sra-674.pdf). Dr. Donald currently has two SSHRC-funded research projects: one on creative class politics in Toronto and Boston which will examine how corporate and occupational change in the new economy is transforming local economic development politics and the other on the urban creative food economy. She has received numerous awards for her research including the Governor General’s Gold Medal for Academic Excellence. Email Michael Katz, Doctoral Candidate, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and is studying the impact of zoning laws on consumers and firms in the supermarket industry. Zoning laws, which restrict the size and location of supermarkets, can change both the location and the equilibrium prices charged by supermarkets. Michael is studying the cumulative effect of zoning laws and the distribution of this effect across demographic groups. Email Parag Pathak, Doctoral Candidate, is a Ph.D. candidate in Business Economics working on issues in school choice and housing in greater Boston. More specifically, his work analyzes residential choice and student assignment in Boston. Parag has also studied how some families in Boston do not report their true preferences over schools to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Choice Mechanism and the impacts of "gaming" of the system. Email Zuoa Vang, Doctoral Candidate, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Her dissertation research examines the ways in which residential segregation impacts the life chances of African immigrants in the United States and the Republic of Ireland. More specifically, she will study how the coupling or decoupling of race and place affect blacks’ educational and employment opportunities, psychosocial health, and exposure to crime and violence. Email |
Contact the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston at: |
Edward
L. Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, became the Institute’s director in June 2004. Glaeser, who also directs the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is the author of numerous papers on the determinants of city growth, the role of cities as centers of idea transmission, and a variety of other urban-related topics. Glaeser is the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics; the co-author (with Alberto Alesina) of Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe (Oxford University Press, 2004); the co-editor (with Claudia Golden) of Corruption and Reform: Lessons From America's Economic History (University of Chicago Press, 2006); and the editor of The Governance of Not-For-Profit Organizations (University of Chicago Press, 2003). He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. 
David
Luberoff became Executive Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston in June 2004. He previously was Associate Director of the Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Luberoff is the co-author (with Alan Altshuler) of Mega Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Brookings Institution Press, 2003), which was named the year’s best book on urban politics by the American Political Science Association. He has also been a columnist on infrastructure issues for Governing magazine, co-editor of "The Public’s Capital", a quarterly forum on infrastructure policy published in Governing; editor of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s 1988 "Midtown/Cultural District Plan" and editor of The Tab, greater Boston’s largest weekly newspaper. He received an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government. He can be reached at (617) 495-1346.