Timothy Layton is the 30th Anniversary Associate Professor of Health Care Policy in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an affiliated researcher at J-PAL at MIT. His research focuses on the economics of health insurance markets, with a particular focus on markets and social health insurance programs for low-income households. 

Atheendar Venkataramani, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine and a board-certified general internist at the University of Pennsylvania Presbyterian Medical Center. He is also Director of the Opportunity for Health Lab. His research focuses on the life-course origins of health and socioeconomic inequality.

The Batten Alumni Advisory Board and The Athletics Career Advisory Board will be hosting a student athlete networking event via zoom on February 21st at 7:00pm ET.  The event targets three groups: (1) student athletes that are looking to join Batten; (2) student athletes that are already in Batten; and (3) student athletes that have graduated from Batten.

Hardy is a nonresident senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, a research fellow with the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and a research affiliate of both the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. His research interests lie within labor economics, with an emphasis on economic instability, intergenerational mobility, poverty policy, racial economic inequality, and socio-economic outcomes.

In this conversation, hosted in partnership with the Karsh Institute of Democracy, E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Miles Rapoport discuss their new book “100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.”

John Sides studies political behavior in American and comparative politics. He is an author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and The Battle for the Meaning of America, The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election, and Campaigns and Election: Rules, Reality, Strategy, Choice. He has published articles in various scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics. His current book project focuses on fiscal politics in the U.S.

Mary Kroeger is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Politics and Social Policy from Princeton University, and holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests are in U.S. state politics, American political institutions, bureaucratic-legislative interactions, policy diffusion, and quantitative methods.

Erika Franklin Fowler is professor of government at Wesleyan University where she directs the Wesleyan Media Project (WMP), which tracks and analyzes political advertising in real-time and local television news across the country.

Craig Volden, Co-Director of the Center for Effective Lawmaking and professor at the Batten School, will join state lawmakers identified by independent observers as exceptional political leaders and leaders of nonprofits dedicated to supporting better political leadership in the U.S. to reflect on the issues at stake for our democracy.

POSTPONED until further notice. For this Merrick Lecture, Catherine Wolfram, Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School ​and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economics at the U.S. Treasury, will join the Batten community. This event will consist of a presentation and discussion on global climate change, policies surrounding the issue and the role economists can (and do) have.