Julien Lafortune is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specializes in K–12 education. His primary areas of focus include education finance, school capital funding policy, and educational tracking and stratification. He has published research on the impacts of school finance reforms on student achievement in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Patricia Malagon is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she focuses on social safety net programs. Before joining PPIC, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, where she analyzed racial disparities in program access and employment outcomes for CalWORKs participants. She holds a BA in political economy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Eric McGhee is a senior fellow at PPIC, where he focuses on elections, legislative behavior, political reform, and surveys and polling. His research on elections and electoral reform has appeared in numerous academic journals, and his work has been profiled on National Public Radio, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Economist. He is the creator of the “efficiency gap”—a widely used measure of gerrymandering—and coauthor of a legal test based on the measure that has been presented before the US Supreme Court in recent high-profile litigation. He is an occasional contributor...
Shalini Mustala is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she focuses on the health care safety net. Before joining PPIC, she worked as a planning engineer for the government of India, working closely with rural infrastructure policies. She has a background in civil and environmental engineering and holds a master’s degree in public policy data science from the University of Southern California.
Daniel Payares-Montoya is a research associate at the PPIC Higher Education Center. His research focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on California’s community colleges, English as a second language, and the relation between labor markets and higher education in California. Before joining PPIC, he worked as a consultant for the World Bank, concentrating on green growth and green finance in developing countries, and as a researcher at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of California Berkeley, focusing on the socio-economic and political impact of globalization and...
Caitlin Peterson is associate director and research fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center. She is an agroecologist whose research spans climate-smart agriculture, soil health, diversified cropping systems, agroecosystem resilience, and multi-benefit agricultural landscapes. In her previous work, she explored irrigation and soil ecosystem functions in California almond and tomato systems, crop-livestock integration in Brazilian soybean-beef systems, and small farmer adaptation to climate change in Colombia, Tanzania, and Ghana. As a consulting agroecologist, she led programs linking...
Deepak Premkumar is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, where he specializes in the intersection of race, criminal justice, and health. Through the lens and tools of an economist, his recent work examines the broader effects of police use-of-force and social costs of policing. He aims to provide an empirical guide to understand the determinants of disparities in the legal and health systems, while investigating policies to alleviate them. He has published a book chapter, co-written with Justin McCrary, in The Cambridge Handbook of Policing in the United States....
Gokce Sencan is a research associate at the PPIC Water Policy Center. Her research interests include water markets and climate-water policy interactions. Prior to joining PPIC, she worked on several projects, including water purchasing opportunities for environmental flows from retiring coal-fired power plants and the financial benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions through land-use interventions in California. She previously worked as an intergovernmental affairs intern at the United Nations Environment Programme in New York and as a climate change research intern at Istanbul...
Tess Thorman is a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, where she studies poverty, inequality, and the social safety net. Recent projects have also focused on California’s stake in the 2020 Census. Before joining PPIC, she worked as a consultant with the Center for Migration Studies of New York, where she researched capacity for implementing a large-scale legalization program for undocumented immigrants. She holds an MPP from the University of Southern California and a BA with majors in English and musical studies from Oberlin College.
