Current Faculty Fellows and Research Affiliates

Nicole Ardoin, Emmett Family Faculty Scholar, is an associate professor of environmental behavioral sciences in the environmental social sciences department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability (SDSS). She is also a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. Ardoin and her Social Ecology Lab research motivations for and barriers to environmental behavior at the individual and collective scales. They use mixed-methods approaches--including participant observation, a variety of interview types, surveys, mapping, network analysis, and ethnography, among others--to consider the influence of place-based connections, environmental learning, and social-ecological interactions on participation in a range of environmental and sustainability-related decision-making processes. Ardoin and her interdisciplinary group pursue their scholarship with a theoretical grounding and orientation focused on applications for practice; much of Ardoin’s work is co-designed and implemented with community collaborators through a field-based, participatory frame. Ardoin is an associate editor of the journal Environmental Education Research, a trustee of the California Academy of Sciences, and chair of NatureBridge’s Education Advisory Council, among other areas of service within the environment and conservation field. Ardoin is a faculty fellow at CASBS. She will be collaborating with Jim Leape and Gabrielle Wong-Parodi on the Transformation Science Initiative.

Studies of contemporary authoritarian politics tend to focus on the institutional features of regimes, particularly the extent to which autocrats rely on militaries, political parties, or personalization of power to maintain control. Faculty fellow Lisa Blaydes studies how social identity categories are generated and reproduced by authoritarian regimes in order to maintain forms of political, economic, and social control in the contemporary Middle East. 

Blaydes is professor of political science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. She is the author of Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018). She was a Mellon Foundation Fellow at CASBS during in 2015-16 and was a returning CASBS fellow in 2023-24.

For more, please visit https://politicalscience.stanford.edu/people/lisa-blaydes 

Laura L. Carstensen is professor of psychology at Stanford University where she is the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL). Her research on the theoretical and empirical study of motivational, cognitive, and emotional aspects of aging has been funded continuously by the National Institute on Aging for more than 30 years. As a faculty fellow, Carstensen looks forward to her collaboration with Dr. Mitchell Stevens on SCL’s Futures Project on Education and Learning for Longer Lives.

Carstensen is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She served on the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on an Aging Society and was a commissioner on the Global Roadmap for Healthy Longevity.  Carstensen’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kleemeier Award, The Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Research and distinguished mentor awards from both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Psychological Association. She is the author of A Long Bright Future: Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity (PublicAffairs, 2011).  Carstensen received her BS from the University of Rochester and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from West Virginia University. She holds honorary doctorates from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the University of Rochester. Carstensen was a fellow at CASBS in 2009-10. For more information about her please visit: longevity.stanford.edu and lifespan.stanford.edu  

Estelle Freedman’s current research project expands upon the legal approach in her book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press, 2013), by exploring digitized oral history collections as sources for understanding personal narratives of assault, rape, and harassment in the twentieth-century U.S. She is working on methodological and historical essays interpreting sexual memories, sexual silences, and the changing language of sexual trauma across diverse groups of narrators. Freedman’s past scholarship has focused on the histories of women, sexuality, feminism, and social movements. In addition to two books on the history of women’s prison reform in the U.S., she is the author of No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine Books, 2002) and the co-author (with John D'Emilio) of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (3rd edition, University of Chicago Press, 2012), and the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader (Modern Library, 2007). She earned her BA at Barnard College, and MA and PhD degrees in U.S. History at Columbia University. Freedman holds the Edgar E. Robinson chair (Emerit) in U.S. History at Stanford, where she co-founded the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has been a CASBS faculty fellow since 2019-20, participating as a member in the CASBS project “Addressing Sexual Violence Through Institutional Courage,” and was a fellow at CASBS in 2009-10 and 2018-19. The documentary film she is co-directing about folk music and social movements, Singing for Justice, will be released in late 2024. For more information, you can find her CV at https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=55788&name=Estelle_Freedman

Robert Gibbons is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and professor in MIT’s department of economics. His research and teaching concern the design and performance of organized activities, especially “relational contracts” (informal agreements so rooted in the parties’ circumstances that they cannot be adjudicated by courts). Since 2002, Gibbons has been co-principal investigator of MIT Sloan’s Program on Innovation in Markets and Organizations. He was founding director of the working group in organizational economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research (2002-22), co-editor (with John Roberts) of The Handbook of Organizational Economics (Princeton University Press) and a board member of the Citicorp Behavioral Science Research Council (1994-2000) and of CASBS (2000-06). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During 2016-19 and 2023-24, Gibbons and Woody Powell (Stanford University) co-ran summer institutes at CASBS for assistant professors studying organizations from multiple disciplines and using many methodologies. During Covid, they held virtual convocations integrating the existing cohorts of summer scholars; before and after the pandemic there have been in-person events integrating the cohorts.  Gibbons is a research affiliate, and was a CASBS fellow in 1994-95 and 2014-15.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. As a research affiliate, she is leading the CASBS project on “The Social Science of Caregiving” along with Margaret Levi and Zachary Ugolnik. She is a world leader in cognitive science, known for her work in the areas of learning and cognitive development. Gopnik is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2000), The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life (Picador, 2010), and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent work is Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy, published in Daedalus (2023).

Gopnik has written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” “The Colbert Report” and “Radio Lab”. Her TED talk has been seen over 5.2 million times. Gopnik was a CASBS fellow in 2003-04.

As a research affiliate, Simon Halliday will continue working on a new introductory economics textbook Understanding the Economy (UTE) as part of the enCOREage project. UTE builds on the work that CORE has already done with The Economy and Economy, Society, and Public Policy. The enCOREage project seeks to address the systemic failure of U.S. colleges and universities to educate our least well off and under-represented minority students. In Understanding the Economy, Halliday and collaborators will introduce content (for the most part new to introductory economics) that draws students in because the topics it addresses confront societal problems that we know interest them and builds employability skills; adopt best practices from modern learning science, which have struggled to find a home in economics instruction; and address student belonging and inclusion.

Halliday is an associate research professor and associate director at the Center for Economy and Society, SNF Agora Institute, at Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins, Halliday (alongside Glory Liu and Angus Burgin) leads the new major in Moral and Political Economy (MPE). He has co-authored (with Samuel Bowles) an intermediate-level microeconomics textbook: Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (OUP, 2022) and works in economics education, behavioral and experimental economics, in particular, on experiments to understand social preferences. He was a CASBS fellow in 2023-24. 

For more information about his work, visit simondhalliday.com

Daniel E. Ho is the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, professor of political science, professor of computer science (by courtesy), and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). He is also director of the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab). Ho serves on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Commission (NAIAC), advising the White House on artificial intelligence, as Senior Advisor on Responsible AI at the U.S. Department of Labor, and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), and as a Member of the Committee on National Statistics. He received his JD from Yale Law School and PhD from Harvard University and clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Ho is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a faculty fellow at CASBS since 2017-18.

Saumitra Jha does research on economic, financial and organizational approaches to mitigating political polarization and violent conflict. An economist by training, his work combines formal theory, qualitative fieldwork, natural experiments in history and contemporary field experiments. He is currently working on three research themes. These include examining how financial innovations and trading opportunities mitigate or exacerbate conflict; how the strategy of nonviolent protest works and why it often also fails; and studying how networks of influential individuals, forged from war-time experiences, can undermine or rebuild democratic freedoms. 

Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in both economics and political science, including the American Economic Review,Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best-published article in political economy from the American Political Science Association and his co-authored work on heroic networks received the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Jha was also honored to receive the Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellows Program. He was a fellow in 2020-21 and is a current faculty fellow. 

For more information, please visit his website: https://saumitra.people.stanford.edu/

James Holland Jones is a professor of Environmental Behavioral Sciences in the Division of Social Sciences, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Originally trained as an anthropologist, he has additional training and expertise in demography, statistics, and epidemiology. Jones works on a variety of projects relating to human adaptability and decision-making, including the analysis of livelihood-related responses to climate change, the role of dynamic exchange networks in managing livelihood risks among subsistence populations, the reconstruction of prehistoric demographic patterns and how these inform debates about climate-mediated collapse, the coupled dynamics of behavior-change and disease transmission, and the impact of structural racism on epidemic outcomes. A major element of his current research involves synthesizing evolutionary, ecological, and climate-science notions of adaptation. He teaches classes such as “Global Change and Emerging Infectious Disease,” “Biological and Social Networks,” “Demography and Life History Theory,” and “Adaptation.” This past winter, he co-taught an interdisciplinary course, along with former CASBS director Margaret Levi and Paula Moya (class of 2016-17 fellow), called “Imagining Adaptive Futures,” which examined how speculative fiction can help us work toward sustainable, equitable, and just futures, even in the face of potentially existential environmental threats. Along with his wife, Libra Hilde (class of 2017-18 fellow), he is a resident fellow at Castaño House. Jones also has a broad interest in the intersection of evolutionary and economic theory, which served as the foundation for his CASBS fellowship in 2015-16. He is currently faculty fellow, and for more information about his work, please find his website at: https://heeh.stanford.edu/

Nan Keohane is a retired scholar of political philosophy who has taught at Swarthmore, Stanford, Wellesley, Duke and Princeton.  She also served as president of Wellesley and then Duke. Keohane was a fellow at CASBS in 1978-79, 1987-88, and 2004-05. Since 2018, she has been a regular visitor to Stanford each winter quarter as a faculty affiliate at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics, working with the postdoctoral fellows. She received her BA from Wellesley, BA/MA at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and PhD in political science at Yale.  She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Keohane is the author of Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1980); Higher Ground:  Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University (Duke University Press, 2006) and Thinking about Leadership (Princeton University Press, 2010). She has co-edited volumes on feminist theory and women and equality. Her current work project, which she will pursue at CASBS as a research affiliate, is a book entitled Virginia Woolf and Modern Feminism. 

Robert O. Keohane is professor of international affairs, emeritus, at the School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University. He is the author of After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton University Press, 1984/2005) and Power and Governance in a Partially Globalized World (Psychology Press, 2002). He is co-author (with Joseph S. Nye, Jr.) of Power and Interdependence (Pearson Higher Ed, 1977/2012), and (with Gary King and Sidney Verba) of Designing Social Inquiry (Princeton University Press, 1994). He has served as the editor of International Organization and as president of the International Studies Association and the American Political Science Association. He won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 1989, and the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, 2005. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences; he is a corresponding member of the British Academy. Keohane has been a research affiliate at CASBS since 2018-19, working on the politics of climate change. He was a CASBS fellow in 1977-78, 1987-88 and 2004-05. 

Jim Leape is the William and Eva Price Senior Fellow and co-director of the Center for Ocean Solutions in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, part of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is currently working with collaborators on how blue foods can contribute to healthy, sustainable food systems, generally and in Indonesia, and on the science of sustainability transformations. Before coming to Stanford in 2014, Leape was director general of World Wildlife Fund International (WWF) and leader of the global WWF Network, one of the world’s largest conservation organizations. Previously, he directed the conservation and science programs of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; served as executive vice president of WWF-US; and was a legal advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya.  Leape has served on several boards; from 2007 to 2017, he was a member of the China Council for International Cooperation in Environment and Development, which advises the Premier of China. He has an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a faculty fellow at CASBS.

Margaret Levi is Senior Fellow, Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and professor emerita of political science, Stanford University. She is a faculty fellow and former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Political Science Association. Recent books include In the Interest of Others (Princeton University Press, 2013), coauthored with John Ahlquist, and A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), coauthored with Federica Carugati. She writes about what makes for trustworthy governance and what evokes citizen compliance, consent, and dissent. As a faculty fellow, Levi will help manage the “Social Science of Caregiving” with Alison Gopnik and the enCOREage project, whose leadership team also includes Simon Halliday, Wendy Carlin, Roby Harrington, and Samuel Bowles. She is co-leader with Michael Bernstein, David Magnus, and Debra Satz of the Ethics and Society Review project. Levi was a fellow at CASBS in 1993-94.

Mary Lopez was the 2023-24 CORE Fellow at CASBS. As a research affiliate, she will continue working on CORE Econ’s newest introductory economics e-book, Understanding the Economy. This book aims to enhance students' engagement with economics by relating it to their lived experiences. It emphasizes critical thinking, data skills, and inclusive teaching methods, focusing on societal issues most important to students. The goal is to make economics more attractive and accessible to a diverse range of students, encouraging them to develop new ideas and potentially reshape the field.

Lopez is a professor of economics at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her research specializes in immigration and immigration policy, Latino entrepreneurship, and economic inequality. She is also a policy expert at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative. Lopez is a member of the American Society for Hispanic Economists and the American Economic Association and a board member of the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession.

For more information about her research, please visit her website: https://www.oxy.edu/academics/faculty/mary-j-lopez

John Markoff is currently a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and an affiliate fellow in the Presence Center at the Stanford School of Medicine. Previously he was a senior writer at the New York Times where he worked from 1988 until he retired at the end of 2016. For much of his career at the Times he was based in San Francisco where he covered Silicon Valley. He also spent four years writing for the Times’ science section. His reporting focused on computer security issues and more generally on the impact of various information technologies on society. He wrote the first article to describe the arrival of the World Wide Web in 1993. Markoff is the author of six books including Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest For Common Ground Between Humans And Machines (Harper Collins, 2016) and Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), which were both written while at CASBS. His current research is focused on exploring the events that took place around Stanford University during the 1960s that led to the emergence of Silicon Valley as an innovation center during the following decade. Markoff was a CASBS fellow in 2017-18.

Mary C. Murphy is the founding director of the CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity. She will spend the year fundraising, developing, and leading the Institute. The CASBS Summer Institute engages in field building around social scientific investigation of when, how, and why difference makes a difference and will develop an on-going collaboration and support network of early career and established scholars from backgrounds underrepresented across the social and behavioral sciences. Murphy’s most recent book, Cultures of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 2024) describes her 10 years of research on reconstruing mindset as a cultural feature of mainstream settings such as organizational and educational settings. She shows how these organizational mindsets shape people’s motivation, engagement, behavior, and performance; companies’ and schools’ culture and organizational performance; and the diversity, equity, and inclusion of organizational and educational settings. Murphy is the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She is the founder of the Equity Accelerator, the nation’s first focused-research organization (FRO) focused on harnessing the social and behavioral sciences to create and sustain more equitable learning and working environments—from college through careers. In the area of organizations and tech, her research examines barriers and solutions for increasing gender and racial diversity and inclusion in STEM fields. Murphy has published more than 100 articles that have shaped several fields. In 2019, Murphy was awarded the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. Government. Murphy was a CASBS fellow in 2015-16 and is a current research affiliate.

During her year as a research affiliate, Sylvia Perry will co-direct the CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity, which successfully launched its inaugural class in the summer of 2023. The CASBS Summer Institute focuses on understanding when, how, and why difference makes a difference in the social sciences. By fostering collaboration, providing support within an academic community, and offering professional development opportunities, the Institute aims to empower early career scholars from underrepresented backgrounds in higher education. Perry will spend the year further developing and implementing the Institute's initiatives centered on diversity. Her research is situated at the intersection of social, developmental, and health psychology, and she investigates how racial bias awareness develops, and the implications of bias awareness for prejudice reduction, intergroup contact, and health disparities. Specifically, her work answers questions such as (1) To what extent do norms around admitting and discussing racism contribute to anti-racism? and (2) How does White parental racial socialization shape the development of their children’s attitudes and behaviors toward Black individuals? Perry is an associate professor of psychology and an Institute for Policy Research faculty fellow at Northwestern University. Her work has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Science and Medicine, and Developmental Psychology. Perry is the recipient of the Society fo­r Personality and Social Psychology's SAGE Young Scholar Award (2020) and the Ann L. Brown Award for excellence in developmental research (2024). Perry was the 2022-23 SAGE Sara Miller McCune CASBS Fellow.

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI. Prior to joining Stanford, Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a 2017-18 CASBS fellow, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. He received a BA and MA in political science from Yale (1992); a JD from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002. Persily has been a faculty fellow since 2018-19. His website is www.persily.com and Twitter handle is @persily.

Woody Powell is Jacks Family Professor of Education, and (by courtesy) professor of sociology, organizational behavior, management science and engineering, and communication at Stanford University. He has been faculty co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society since its founding in 2006. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aalto University, and is an international member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and The British Academy. With Bob Gibbons (MIT), he has led the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) summer institute on Organizations and their Effectiveness since 2016. Currently a faculty fellow, he was a fellow at CASBS in 1986-87 and 2008-09, and interim director in 2022-23. He works on questions of emergence, e.g., where does novelty come from, and historical persistence, e.g. why are some things sticky. 

Mitchell Stevens is professor of education at Stanford, where he convenes the Pathways Network. He studies the history, finance, and politics of postsecondary education in the United States and worldwide. The author of award-winning studies of home education and selective admissions, his most recent books are Remaking College: The Changing Ecology of Higher Education (Stanford University Press, 2015) and Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Princeton University Press, 2018). As co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, he leads a project on futures of education and learning for longer lives. He has written scholarly articles for a variety of academic journals and editorial for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other venues. Stevens is a faculty fellow at CASBS.

Robert I. Sutton is an organizational psychologist and professor of management science and engineering, emeritus, at Stanford University.  He studies leadership, innovation, organizational change, and workplace dynamics.  Sutton has published over 200 articles, chapters, and case studies in scholarly and applied outlets.  His main focus over the past decade is on scaling and leading at scale—how to grow organizations, spread good things (and remove bad things) in teams and organizations, and enhance performance, innovation, and well-being in organizations as they become larger, more complex, and older.   

Sutton received his PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty since 1983. At Stanford, Sutton is co-founder and former co-director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and co-founder of the “d.school,” a multi-disciplinary program that helps people, teams, and organizations reach their creative potential.  He has served on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly publications, and as an editor for the Administrative Science Quarterly and Research in Organizational Behavior.

Sutton has published eight books and two edited volumes.  These include The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Weird Ideas That Work, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense (with Jeffrey Pfeffer) (Harvard Business Review Press, 2006), The No Asshole Rule (A New York Times bestseller) (Business Plus, 2007), Good Boss, Bad Boss (A New York Times bestseller) (Balance, 2012), Scaling-Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao, a Wall Street Journal bestseller) (Crown Publishing, 2014) and The Asshole Survival Guide (Harper Business, 2018).  Sutton and Huggy Rao’s latest book is The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin’s Press, 2024).  It unpacks insights from their a seven-year project that used academic research, case studies, classes and workshops, and ongoing dialog with scholars, executives, and innovators to learn how smart organizations remove bad friction and inject good friction and do it without driving employees and customers crazy.  

Sutton is currently a faculty fellow at CASBS, and was a fellow in 1986-87, 1994-95, and 2002-03.  His personal website is bobsutton.net.   

Kabir Tambar is currently completing a book manuscript on languages of solidarity in the Middle East. The work centers on an early twentieth century moment when revolutionary dreams of inter-religious brotherhood and equality in the framework of the late Ottoman empire collapsed. This collapse was occasioned by a history of genocide, dispossession, and rising ethnonationalism. The book examines non-nationalist responses to the violence of those years, and in particular it studies how certain practices that had been central to the now failed horizons of revolutionary solidarity – practices of collective mourning, translation, and historical criticism – persisted for certain Ottoman Greek and Ottoman Armenian figures of the era. Tabar suggests that by attending more closely to the politics of friendship in this moment we can become more attentive to non-national political possibilities that persist even today.

Tambar is associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University. His research and teaching examine debates about secularism, minority recognition, and state violence primarily in Turkey and more broadly in Europe and the Middle East. He is a faculty fellow at CASBS and was a fellow in 2023-24.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, where he studies the impact of new media technologies on American culture from World War II to the present. He is currently exploring ways that feminist and queer artists took up photography and electronic media in the late 1970s and early 1980s with an eye to understanding how changes in media technology shaped the origins of today’s culture wars. Turner is the author of five books, including From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Most recently he and photographer Mary Beth Meehan co-created the award-winning collection of images and essays Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America (University of Chicago Press, 2021). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at New York University, a Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University, and twice a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2007-2008 and 2014-2015). Before becoming a professor, he worked as a journalist for ten years. His recent writing has appeared in a variety of venues, including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The American Prospect, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Die Zeit. Turner is a faculty fellow at CASBS.

Abraham Verghese MD, a CASBS faculty fellow since 2017-18, is a clinician and heads the Stanford Presence Center, which focuses on the human connection in medicine. Housed within the Stanford School of Medicine, Presence seeks to add the social science dimensions to a multidisciplinary focus on balancing high touch and high tech for the equitable and inclusive experience of medicine. Their research aims include: understanding the human experience of patients, physicians and caregivers and how it relates to medical error and outcomes; and how to leverage technology for the human experience of medicine. Past fruitful collaborations with CASBS fellows have utilized insights from sociology, psychology, political science, organizational economics, and other disciplines to further projects at Presence. Verghese’s non-medical writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, the Atlantic, and other venues. His novel Cutting for Stone (Knopf, 2009) spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His latest novel, The Covenant of Water (Grove Atlantic, 2023) debuted on the New York Times list at #4.

At Stanford’s School of Medicine, Verghese is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and the Vice Chair for Humanism in the department of medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and pulmonary medicine. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees, an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, and the American Association of Arts & Sciences. In September 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.

As a faculty fellow in 2024-25, Robb Willer will work on a project using Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate experimental results in the social sciences. The forthcoming year will see him exploring the application of LLMs to political research, social science methodology, and the promotion of psychological well-being.

Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology and organizational behavior at Stanford University whose work centers on how to overcome political divisions to foster social change. He employs diverse methods in his research, including survey and behavioral experiments, natural language processing, fMRI, social network analysis. He has consulted for a number of organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the AFL-CIO, the Department of Justice, and two presidential campaigns. His TED talk “How to Have Better Political Conversations” has been viewed over 2.8 million times. Willer’s research has received widespread media coverage including from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Washington Post, Science, Nature, Time, Slate, CNN, NBC Nightly News, and The Today Show. Willer was a CASBS fellow in 2012-13 and 2020-21.

As a faculty fellow in 2024-25, Gabrielle Wong-Parodi will co-lead the Transformation Science Initiative (TSI) with Sarah Soule, Jim Leape, and Nicole Ardoin. TSI aims to advance theory on “transformation science” and to create the evidence-base to achieve lasting, deep transformation across sectors and regions globally.

Wong-Parodi’s research focuses on applying behavioral decision research methods to address challenges associated with global environmental change. She seeks to understand the psychosocial and contextual factors that influence people’s responses to environmental change – especially extremes – over time, with a particular focus on those communities that have been historically marginalized or disproportionately impacted by climate change. She also uses behavioral decision science approaches to create and evaluate evidence-based strategies for informed decision making, with a particular focus on building resilience and promoting sustainability in the face of a changing climate.

Wong-Parodi is an assistant professor of Earth System Science and Environmental Social Sciences, as well as a center fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. She currently serves as an advisory board member at the National Academies for the US Global Change Research Program. She also serves as a committee member for the American Psychological Association’s Climate Change Psychology Community initiative.