Martha Bailey, Ph.D
Principal Investigator
Martha Bailey is a Professor in the Department of Economics and a Faculty Affiliate at the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Affiliate at CESifo, and an IZA Research Fellow. Her research focuses on issues in labor economics, demography and health in the United States, within the long-run perspective of economic history.
Mengying Zhang
Project Manager
Mengying Zhang is the project manager for the LIFE-M project, where she oversees the design and implementation of all technical aspects of the project from record linkage modeling, intergenerational data pipeline to link quality control. She holds a B.S. in Statistics and M.S. in Information Science at the University of Michigan. She is passionate about data science, machine learning, natural language processing and general programming.
Peter Z. Lin, Ph.D
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Peter Zhixian Lin is a post-doctoral research fellow affiliated with the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at the University of California, Los Angeles. He contributes to the LIFE-M project by developing and disseminating the data. He is also using the LIFE-M data for multiple research projects addressing the historical marriage mobility and intergenerational health correlation. He holds a Ph.D in economics from University of California, Davis.
Alexa Prettyman, Ph.D
Research Data Analyst
Alexa Prettyman is a research data analyst on the LIFE-M project assisting with data documentation and dissemination. Alexa also works on research projects and proposals using LIFE-M data and leads the undergraduate research fellows. She holds a Ph.D and M.A. in Economics from Georgia State University and a B.S. in Mathematical Economics from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests are in labor and public economics.
Shariq Mohammed, Ph.D
Assistant Professor
Shariq Mohammed is an assistant professor of Economics at Northeastern University. He was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the LIFE-M project, where he contributed to the production and dissemination of the LIFE-M data. He holds Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Arizona, and M.Phil. and M.A. in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University. lies at the intersection of labor economics, economic history, and development economics. His ongoing research relates to understanding the evolution of access to opportunities and how it differs across groups (e.g., race, gender, caste), and more importantly, what policies can help bridge this gap.
Paul Mohnen, Ph.D
Senior Fellow
Paul Mohnen is a Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He was previously a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the LIFE-M project, where he contributed to various aspects of the LIFE-M data creation process. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University. His research focuses on issues related to the labor market, aging, and economic mobility.
Mari Hashimoto
Research Area Specialist
Mari Hashimoto is a research area specialist for Martha Bailey’s research group at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. She supports the group from both technical and administrative sides, working on data cleaning, field experiments, and project management. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan, a Master of Environmental Studies and a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Tokyo, where she majored in urban planning. Prior to her MPP study, she worked for a think tank in Tokyo, Japan on various research projects on urban revitalization.
Alex Coblin
Research Assistant
Alex Coblin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was previously a Graduate Student Researcher for LIFE-M and the California Policy Lab, and was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is interested in economic history and urban economics research topics with a focus on racial inequality. His current research project examines the causes and consequences of racial restrictive covenants in urban real estate markets. He holds an MA in Economics from UCLA and a BA in Chinese and Political Science from Middlebury College.
Joaquin Serrano
Research Assistant
Joaquin Serrano is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was previously a Graduate Student Researcher for LIFE-M. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, he earned a bachelors and masters degree in Economics at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. His current research interests are in labor economics and economic history.
Eytan Adar, Ph.D
Collaborator
Eytan Adar is an Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science at the UM. Adar’s expertise linking large-scale data to form social networks will inform LIFE-M’s reconstruction of large-scale family networks across generations from tens of millions of vital records and census data. Adar and his lab will contribute to the design and planning of the data linking methodology, including the development of specific techniques for LIFE-M’s link-prediction and multiple-link disambiguation, and implementation of linking methods.
George Alter, Ph.D
Collaborator
George Alter is a Research Professor Emeritus at The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the Population Studies Center. Alter has extensive knowledge of the history of the family, demographic history, and fertility transitions in Europe and East Asia and of the effects of childhood experiences on health in old age. Alter has research experience with data compilation, archiving, and family linking as well as a background in data curation and preservation as a former director of ICPSR.
Connor Cole, Ph.D
Collaborator
Connor Cole is an economist at the U.S. Treasury Department. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, a Masters of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a bachelors degree in mathematics from Carleton College, Connor worked on the LIFE-M project as a PhD student at the University of Michigan. His current research interests are in labor force participation of women, education attainment across generations, and asset accumulation patterns among low income workers.
Bill Collins, Ph.D
Collaborator
Bill Collins is the Terence E. Adderley Jr. Professor of Economics at Vanderbilt University, Research Associate of the NBER, and co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He is an economic historian whose research concentrates on twentieth-century labor markets and cities in the United States. His recent work has studied inter-regional migration, racial disparities in earnings and educational attainment, and urban renewal programs.
Dora Costa, Ph.D
Collaborator
Dora L. Costa is Kenneth T. Sokoloff Professor of Economic History at UCLA’s Economics Department where she teaches economic history and health economics. She is also the department chair, a research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) programs on the Development of the American Economy and on Aging and the director of the NBER working group Cohort Studies. Costa’s research focuses primarily on issues in labor economics, demography, and health, as interpreted over the long span of American economic history.
Katie Genadek, Ph.D
Collaborator
Katie Genadek is the director of the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage project at the U.S. Census Bureau and research faculty at the University of Colorado and ICPSR. Dr. Genadek works on building and improving data infrastructure for research, linking historical and modern census data, and documenting administrative and survey data for social science research. Her research focuses on policy impacts on women’s work, fertility, and the relationship between work and family for individuals, couples and parents.
Susan Hautaniemi Leonard, Ph.D
Collaborator
Susan Leonard is an Associate Research Scientist at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan. Dr. Leonard’s work focuses on the relationship between human populations and their environments. Her research interests include historical epidemiology and mortality, household dynamics and farming practices, population dynamics, disclosure risk, and the impact of liberal arts education.
Margaret Levenstein, Ph.D
Collaborator
Margaret Levenstein is the director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the Executive Director at the Michigan Federal Statistical Research Data Center and a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research and the University of Michigan School of Information. Levenstein’s research on historical migration, employment, and innovation makes extensive use of historical census data (1870 to 1940). Moreover, her on-going work with the Census Bureau to improve record linkage practices, especially links to employment registers, both contributes expertise to the LIFE-M project and creates synergies with these initiatives.
Bhash Mazumder, Ph.D
Collaborator
Bhash Mazumder is a senior economist and research advisor in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He also serves as an advisor to the Chicago Federal Statistical Research Data Center (FSRDC) and is an affiliated scholar at the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality. Mazumder’s research has been focused in four main areas: intergenerational economic mobility; the long-term effects of poor health early in life, black-white gaps in human capital development and urban development during the 20th century. Mazumder has linked Census data from IPUMs for several of his research projects.
Joe Price, Ph.D
Collaborator
Joseph Price is a Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics, a Research Fellow at the Sutherland Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Austin Institute, a Fellow at the Wheatley Institution, a Co-Editor of the Economics of Education Review, and the Director of the BYU Record Linking Lab. Dr. Price has published over 50 articles including articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Health Economics, Demography, and Management Science. He received a B.A in Economics from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University. His lab also uses the human-created linkages available on the Family Tree at FamilySearch to complement approaches based on machine learning. His current research projects relate to family, labor, health, and behavioral economics.
Evan Roberts, Ph.D
Collaborator
Evan Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Population Studies at the University of Minnesota, and is affiliated with the Minnesota Population Center. His research focuses on long-term change in health and employment, with ongoing research projects in the United States and New Zealand. Recent publications with linked data include studies of the health of WWII soldiers in New Zealand, the influence of family structure on children’s stature in the United States, and life course transitions in Norwegian return migrants. Roberts brings long experience with the construction of the IPUMS and North Atlantic Population Project linked census samples to the LIFE-M project.
This work would not have been possible without the dedicated commitment from so many graduate and undergraduate students over the years. A special shout out to all of our data trainers!
Other valuable alumni include:
Morgan Henderson, Ph.D
Graduate Student
Morgan Henderson is currently a senior data scientist at The Hilltop Institute, a health policy research institute at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and is also affiliate faculty in the UMBC economics department. His current research focuses on predictive modeling, healthcare pricing, and Medicaid policy. He was a member of the original LIFE-M team while a PhD student in economics at the University of Michigan.
Meizi Li
Project Manager
Meizi Li was the project manager for LIFE-M from overseeing data cleaning and the management of other Research Assistants. She worked closely with the PI and other collaborators regarding the various technical and scientific aspects of the project. Li holds a dual Master of Public Policy and Master of Arts in China Studies, with a graduate certificate in Data Science from the University of Michigan.
Megan Son
Research Fellow
Megan Son graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a major in Statistics and minor in English. As a Research Fellow for LIFE-M, Megan assisted in developing the user guide for the creation of intergenerational datasets. She is interested in using quantitative methods and data analysis to remedy inequities in educational, criminal justice, and economic outcomes.
Zach Wrubel
Research Fellow
Zach Wrubel graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a degree in Economics and Cognitive Science. As a Research Fellow for LIFE-M, Zach contributed to data cleaning and identifying errors in the framework of the LIFE-M dataset. His research focuses on the differences in intergenerational mobility, longevity, and educational attainment across race and sex.
Li Zhijian
Research Fellow
Li Zhijian graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a major in Mathematics-Economics. As a Research Fellow for LIFE-M, Li contributed to data cleaning and identifying errors in the framework of the LIFE-M dataset. He is interested in various topics in applied microeconomics including demographics and household finance. Raised in China and Singapore, he hopes to pursue graduate studies in economics in the future.
