faculty & staff

Elisheva Avishai is a strategist, teacher, and non-profit leader who has worked in education for more than 25 years. Avishai has consulted to school districts across the United States and Canada, with a focus on leadership development and building innovative practices. She is the founder of the I-Think Initiative at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, which teaches integrative thinking to students, teachers, and education leaders across Canada and the United States. She has an MBA from Rotman and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard.

Timothy Brennan is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and holds a doctorate in political science from Boston College. His research focuses on the history of political thought, especially Enlightenment and American political thought. He has published articles in Political Theory, History of Political Thought, Interpretation, the Review of Politics, History of European Ideas, The European Legacy, and the Journal of Politics, and is currently revising a book manuscript. Before joining the University of Austin, he taught at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia. He is originally from Sydney, Australia.

Fr. Maximos Constas previously served as a professor and Interim Dean of Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He completed his PhD in Patristics and Historical Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1993), after which he taught at Hellenic College and Holy Cross (1993-1998). In the fall of 1998, he was invited to join the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, where he was Professor of Patristics and Orthodox Theology from 1998-2004. Fr. Maximos resigned from his position at Harvard to respond to a life-long calling to monastic life and was tonsured a great-schema monk at the Holy Monastery of Simonopetra, where he lived from 2004-2011.

Fr Maximos is the author of Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to the Questions of Thalassios (2019); St John Chrysostom and the Jesus Prayer: A Contribution to the Study of the Philokalia (2019); and The Light of the World: Prayers to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (2020). He has also written numerous scholarly articles, including “Dionysius the Areopagite and the New Testament” in the Oxford Handbook of Dionysius the Areopagite (2022); “Attentiveness and Digital Culture,” in Theology and Praxis from Late Byzantium to Modernity (2022); “The Theology of the Icon” in The Icon; and “Saints and Elders of Mount Athos” in the Routledge Handbook of Mt Athos (both forthcoming in 2023). His most recent book is a critical edition and English translation of the tenth-century Life of the Virgin Mary by John Geometres published by Harvard University Press, earlier this year.

Victor Emma-Adamah works in the areas of philosophy of religion and religious studies, at the intersection of the disciplines of philosophy and theology. His areas of specialization lie broadly in metaphysics, in the history of early modern and modern philosophy, 19^th-century contexts of French philosophy and French Spiritualism (from Biran to Bergson), and 20^th-century French Continental philosophy and phenomenology (M. Merleau-Ponty, E. Levinas, M. Henry). His research explores themes of personhood and modern conceptions of subjectivity and humanisms; philosophies of body and materiality; the philosophy of technology; metaphysics and spiritual realisms; as well as global histories of philosophy, African thought and practice. The overall arc of his research interest is the quest for a deeper understanding of the diverse facets of the modern self and ways of being, in order to recover the dimension of a meaningful spiritual reality for life. Before taking up his present position at UATX, he was a Visiting Scholar and part-time lecturer in the Philosophy Department of Boston College; a Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophical Theology at Puritan Theological Seminary; a Research Fellow and part-time lecturer at the Catholic University of Toulouse, France. He is completing a monograph in 19^th and 20^th-century metaphysics titled Being and Movement: Félix Ravaisson, French Spiritualism and the Metaphysics of Activity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). He is editor of a forthcoming work titled,French Spiritualism: New Horizons in Continental Philosophy (Lexington Books, forthcoming), and recently co-edited a book in 19^th-century French religious philosophy, Victor Emma-Adamah, Simone Kotva, and Clare Carlisle (eds), Félix Ravaisson: Fragments on Philosophy and Religion (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. He has published extensively on diverse topics of philosophy and religious thought, including a forthcoming article in Modern Theology, titled “Transformation and Transcending: Falque, Deleuze and the Experience of Becoming-Other.”

Boris Fishman is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes, all from HarperCollins, which will also publish his new novel, The Unwanted, in 2025. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and has contributed journalism to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure (where he is a contributing writer), Saveur, Food & Wine, The American Scholar, New York Magazine, Politico, and many other publications.

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Professor Patrick Gray is UATX's Dean of the Center for Arts and Letters. Previously, Gray served as Director of Liberal Arts at Durham University, where he was responsible for designing and introducing a new interdisciplinary core curriculum in the humanities. Before taking up his appointment at Durham, Gray taught comparative literature at Deep Springs College and the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gray is the author of Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic, editor of Shakespeare and the Ethics of War, and co-editor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics and Shakespeare and Montaigne.

“We will give students a structured introduction to the full scope of human civilization and history and art.”

Clay Greene is a scholar of early modern literature and thought. He received his Ph.D. in English and Renaissance Studies at Yale. His work focuses on the literary, philosophical, and historical inheritances of early modern Greece and Rome

Dr. Greene’s scholarly interests lie in early modern England's literary and intellectual culture, especially from the 1650s through the 1750s. Within that broad framework, he studies the intersections of philosophy, theology, and poetry, with a focus on the poetic work of John Milton. His dissertation project covered the revival of the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul among English poets and philosophers, arguing that this revival constituted a genuine religious movement of significance. He is fascinated by how individual moral and spiritual considerations always take place against a complete background of metaphysical assumptions about the nature and significance of reality. No era better exemplifies this fact than the late seventeenth century, a time when the “world pictures” of entire societies were in radical flux. Recently, his interests have shifted from the metaphysical to the physical, focusing on the imagination of warfare in early modernity. Still, even here, the focus remains on how beliefs about war crucially depend upon general beliefs about man’s role in the cosmic drama of creation.

Dr. Greene’s next project is a study of the relationship between epic poetry and warfare, focusing on the sublime poetics of physical size and power. "Paradise Lost" is at the center of that study, which also includes William Davenant’s "Gondibert," John Dryden’s "Annus Mirabilis," and short works by Joseph Addison and Aphra Behn.

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Dr. Ryan Haecker is a theologian and philosopher whose research in systematic and historical theology explores the absolute questions of logic, science, and technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a member of the European Academy of Religions, and serves on the editorial board of the journal Religions. He was in April 2022 awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Theology and Religious Studies from Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation supervised by Rowan Williams explores theological interpretations of logic in the systematic theology of Origen of Alexandria as a critical resource for modern Christian theology. Beginning with a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he is revising his doctoral dissertation, Restoring Reason: Theology of Logic in Origen of Alexandria, which is under contract to be published the new Verlag Karl Alber book series Studies on Triadic Ontology and Trinitarian Philosophy. He has previously studied history, philosophy, and theology at the University of Texas, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Nottingham. He has published 59 articles in journals, as book chapters, and as book reviews, including 9 peer-reviewed journal articles in journals, including Religions, Noesis, and The Journal of the Oxford Graduate Theological Society. He has presented over 138 papers and talks at conferences around the world. He led the organization of the international and ecumenical September 2019 New Trinitarian Ontologies Conference at the University of Cambridge. He has frequently been interviewed by the BBC, the Cambridge Festival, and many online podcasts. His research interests extend across a vast range of topics, including Trinitarian Ontology, Philosophy of Logic, Platonism, Patristics, and German Idealism. He has written a monograph Analogy and Dialectic: A Genealogy of the Trinity. He is currently editing a forthcoming book, New Trinitarian Ontologies, which is under contract with Cascade Books. And he hopes in the future to write a general prolegomenon for a future trinitarian ontology, Theology of Logic: A New Introduction to Absolute Knowing.

Kirsten Herlin graduated from Hillsdale College and completed her PhD in English at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to the University of Austin, she served as the Director of the Literature Program at Ave Maria University. She is currently the Managing Editor of the Genealogies of Modernity Journal. Her research focuses on religion and eighteenth-century British literature, and her work has been published in academic journals such as Modern Philology, Renascence, and Notes & Queries. She has also appeared as a guest on National Review’s podcast The Great Books and has written articles for The Weekly Standard and The New Atlantis.

J. Michael Hoffpauir is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in Intellectual Foundations. Previously, Hoffpauir taught in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, at Hillsdale College, and in the Lyceum Program in political and economic thought at Clemson University, where he also served as the program’s Associate Director. He has also taught in the Hudson Institute Political Studies program and in the America Enterprise Institute’s 1789 Fellowship in American Political Thought & Modern Practice.

Hoffpauir’s research interests include ancient and modern political thought, statesmanship, and the American founding. He is the author of Between Socrates and the Many: A Study of Plato’s Crito, and he is currently preparing a book manuscript, Vengeance as Justice. Hoffpauir received a B.A. in Political Science from Louisiana State University, an M.A. in Political Science from Boston College, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Claremont Graduate University.

Thomas L. Hogan is an Associate Professor in the Center for Economics, Politics, and History at the University of Austin. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University and an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hogan was formerly the chief economist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He has also worked at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Troy University, West Texas A&M University, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the Cato Institute, the World Bank, Merrill Lynch’s commodity trading group, and for investment firms in the U.S. and Europe. Dr. Hogan’s research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Macroeconomics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. He has appeared on media outlets such as Fox News, CNBC, BBC World News, and National Public Radio (NPR). Dr. Hogan is a Senior Research Fellow with the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and an Associate Senior Research Fellow with AIER.

Professor Jacob Howland is Dean of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations program, which comprises the first two years of our undergraduate curriculum. Previously, Howland served as McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa and Senior Fellow at the Tikvah Fund. He is the author of five books and one edited book, including two on Plato’s Republic as well as studies of Kierkegaard and the Talmud. Howland’s articles have appeared in The New Criterion, City Journal, and The Nation, among others.

“We aspire to form graduates who are exemplary selves in the Socratic sense: active, reflective, confident individuals and responsible citizens.”

Dr. Tim Kane is a Professor of Economics at UATX and one of the leaders of the Polaris Project. He is the author of The Immigrant Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Balance: The Economics of Great Powers (Simon and Schuster, 2013) with Glenn Hubbard, and Bleeding Talent (Palgrave, 2012). Kane earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and a Bachelor's degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy. His writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Defining Ideas, and Commentary Magazine. He is often a guest on CNN, NPR, PBS, CNBC, and Fox News. Kane's Substack is WhyAmerica?

Pano Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Kanelos served as the 24th President of St. John’s College, Annapolis. After earning degrees from Northwestern University (B.A.), Boston University (M.A.), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), he taught at Stanford University, the University of San Diego, and Loyola University Chicago.

An outspoken advocate for liberal education, he oversaw the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, comprising a network of more than 100 colleges and universities. Among the earliest participants in the Teach for America program, President Kanelos is as passionate about teaching as he is about writing and scholarship. He founded the Cropper Center for Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and is a noted Shakespeare scholar, having served as the resident Shakespearean in the Old Globe MFA Program and the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Shakespeare Studies Program at Loyola University Chicago.

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Alexander Kolpakov graduated with a PhD from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland in 2012. Since then he has authored and co-authored more than 40 papers in pure and applied mathematics, published in leading peer-review journals and conferences such as TPAMI, ICLR, and many others. Alexander's research interests belong to several domains, widely ranging from combinatorics to Riemannian geometry, to applications in data science, machine learning, and computer vision. His recent work includes a computer-assisted proof of the Rational Tetrahedra Conjecture formulated by J.H. Conway and A. Jones in 1976, as well as a state-of-the-art initialization approach improving the classical ICP algorithm in computer vision. Alexander's work has been featured in the popular Quanta Magazine. Alexander is also Managing Editor of the Journal of Experimental Mathematics (published by the Association for Mathematical Research).

Morgan Marietta is Dean of the Center for Economics, Politics & History. Prior to joining the University of Austin, he taught at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for eleven years and served as Chair of Political Science (briefly) at the University of Texas at Arlington. He studies the political consequences of belief, focusing on constitutional politics, political psychology, and facts in politics. He is the author of four books, including A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology, A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution and the Supreme Court, The Politics of Sacred Rhetoric: Absolutist Appeals and Political Persuasion, and most recently One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. His studies of contemporary politics, including absolutist rhetoric, ideological premises, the rhetoric of reality, and the role of hubris have appeared in the leading journals in political science, including the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and the American Political Science Review. He is the founding editor of the annual SCOTUS series at Palgrave Macmillan on the major rulings of the Supreme Court and is a regular commentator on constitutional politics. His current book project is The Supreme Court of Facts, on the role of the Court in addressing disputed perceptions of reality.

“At the University of Austin, no one will be shouted down but they might be shown to be wrong.”

Eliah Overbey comes to UATX from her position as a research associate at Weill Cornell Medicine. She studies changes in astronaut health during spaceflight with an emphasis on genomic measurements. Her most recent project analyzed genomic changes in astronauts from the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, and she is currently working on data analysis and sample collection for the Axiom-2 and Polaris Dawn missions. Her work launched the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), an online portal with the largest compendium of molecular measurements from astronauts. She also serves as Vice Chair of the Cornell Aerospace Medicine Biobank (CAMbank), which is the first biorepository of samples from commercial astronauts, and as Chief Scientific Officer at BioAstra, a nonprofit developing healthcare systems for astronauts. Dr. Overbey received a B.S. in Computer Science from UC San Diego and her Ph.D. in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington.

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Allen Porter is a philosopher from New Orleans with interests in phenomenology, ethics, politics, the philosophy of technology, and the history of philosophy. He will assume the position of Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Center for Arts and Letters at the University of Austin in the summer of 2025.

Dr. Porter is a postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education. Before that, he was a John and Daria Barry Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rice University in 2021. His dissertation, Social Justice Leftism as Deconstructive Postmodernism, analyzed the philosophical foundations of the political ideology nowadays known as “wokeism” or “woke leftism.” He holds a M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University and a B.A. in German from Princeton University.

Dr. Porter is most known for his work on transhumanism and posthumanism. He is currently producing an edited volume, Phenomenology & Posthumanism(s), for Springer’s Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture book series, and he will contribute the chapter “The Future of Transhumanism” for the new edition of Michel Tibayrenc’s On Human Nature. Dr. Porter’s other lines of research and publication projects are united by his concern to elaborate and apply the Heideggerian existential
phenomenology which provides the primary philosophical and methodological ground for all his work.

Dr. Porter has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, and the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, as well as in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and RealClearPolitics, among others. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. When not preoccupied with philosophy, professional matters, politics, or the mundane necessities of everyday life, he enjoys powerlifting, videogaming, IPAs, and watching Red Letter Media.

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Alex Priou received a Ph.D. and M.A. in Philosophy from Tulane University, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut.

Priou is the author of three books on Plato: "Becoming Socrates: Political Philosophy in Plato’s Parmenides" (2018), "Defending Socrates: Political Philosophy Before the Tribunal of Science" (2023), and "Musings on Plato’s 'Symposium'" (2023). He has also written essays on the history of philosophy for various journals and edited volumes in Classics, Philosophy, Political Science, Literature, and Film, including studies of Homer, Hesiod, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and beyond. He also engages in public scholarship, occasionally writing for a general audience, but most frequently with The New Thinkery, a weekly podcast he co-hosts with his two close friends, Gregory McBrayer and David Bahr. Together, they aim to model friendly and fun conversations between friends on texts and topics in the history of philosophy.

Priou is currently at work on a book on Plato’s Republic that will offer a comprehensive overview of its drama that situates the characters, with all their hopes, opinions, and commitments, in the context of the political events that have shaped them. He hopes to show how Socrates’ investigation of the good life amid the political and moral decline of imperial Athens can serve as a model for us today, confronted as we are by similar circumstances. After that, he plans to resume work on a non-historical study of the nature of civilization and barbarism intended for a more general, educated audience.

David Puelz is a Bayesian statistician and professor working at the intersection of computational data analysis and machine learning.  He writes and researches on economics, the social sciences, and applied artificial intelligence. He is also faculty at The University of Texas at Austin in The School of Civic Leadership and McCombs School of Business. Puelz previously was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and an analyst for Goldman Sachs & Co. He received a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Wesleyan University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from The University of Texas at Austin.

Isabella Reinhardt works on Greek thought of the 5th-century BC. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021. Before taking up her position at UATX, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on Greek tragedy, particularly the dramas of Aeschylus, and presocratic philosophy. Isabella’s current book project, Absent Present: Language and Concept in Early Greek Thought, examines the link the between abstract knowledge and language in 5th-century Greece. A forthcoming article from Classical World argues that we may find traces of Parmenidean thought in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and that these traces provide insight into the play’s presentation of human knowledge, human suffering, and divine causation.

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Scott Reznick is a literary scholar who specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, though his research and teaching interests reside at the intersections between literature, philosophy, and political life more broadly. He will begin teaching at UATX in Fall 2025.

Dr. Reznick’s first book, Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism (Oxford University Press, 2024), reexamines the relationship between two of modernity’s most important intellectual traditions. It shows how American literary Romanticism developed in response to pervasive conflicts over democracy’s moral dimensionsin the early republic and antebellum eras as U.S. writers grew increasingly preoccupied with how individuals come to embrace their most deeply held convictions—and what happens when they encounter others who see the world differently.

His work has also appeared in a range of scholarly journals, including Early American Literature; ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Arizona Quarterly; and American Political Thought, and he has written about the broader role of literature and the humanities for The Hedgehog Review Online. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Boston College.

Carmen Rodriguez is a Learning Experience Designer and Co-Creation Facilitator. She currently assists with the Polaris Project at the University of Austin. Prior to UATX, Carmen served as the Director of the Learning Innovation Center at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. In this role, she led a program that provided workshops and resources to faculty members, promoting deep, active, and collaborative learning for professors across Latin America. Carmen was a Polaris Fellow at UATX, a Future of Freedom Fellow for the Philadelphia Society, and a Jordan Peterson Fellow. Carmen holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from U.F.M. and an MBA from the Acton School of Business.

Professor David Ruth is Dean of UATX's Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Previously, Ruth held several leadership positions as a Permanent Military Professor of Mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, where he was an award-winning teacher from 2009 until 2022. Ruth has authored several articles in a variety of statistics journals, as well as a book chapter on mathematics in cybersecurity. Prior to his academic work, Ruth led and served as a naval officer with operational experience in submarine and surface warfare, nuclear power, oceanography, and meteorology.

“I love quantitative thinking but I love people even more, and I’m excited to be at a place where those two loves are going to join.”

Scott Scheall is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Economics in the Center for Economics, Politics & History. Prior to joining the University of Austin, he taught for fourteen years at Arizona State University. Scott’s research considers the significance of human ignorance for decision-making, particularly in the political realm. He is the author of two books, F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics: The Curious Task of Economics and Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance, a unique textbook freely available for use in courses in political philosophy, political science, economics, and political economy. His work has appeared in journals in philosophy, political economy, history of economics, bioethics, and cognitive psychology. Scott is co-editor of Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, and founder, producer, and former co-host of the long-running podcast Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast. He occasionally posts and podcasts at his Substack page, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance.

The Chair is intended to advance the study of censorship and the technological, political, economic, and cultural conditions that lead to the suppression of speech. By exposing students to historical and recent manifestations of censorship, the Chair will facilitate the responsible exercise of free speech in a pluralistic society.

Michael Shellenberger is a best-selling author, a publisher of the Twitter files, and a pro-human environmentalist. He has broken a number of major stories, including San Francisco's supervised drug consumption site and cash incentives for homelessness, FBI misinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, climate pseudoscience and climate anxiety, and more. As a leading expert on the suppression of speech who testifies and advises governments worldwide, Michael is uniquely qualified to lead UATX in its studies of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

“The University of Austin has a mission focused on free and open inquiry, and we want to revitalize that open inquiry, that open debate.”

Mike Shires is Chief of Staff and SVP for Strategy and Operations at UATX as well as a Professor of Economics and Public Policy. He oversees the team developing the nation’s newest and most innovative university, finding new pedagogical and curricular models to prepare students to succeed in today’s dynamic workplace and building an institution that rethinks the administrative model of tomorrow’s university. Their mission is to build a new university that is committed to the pursuit of truth through open dialogue and civil discourse. Before assuming his role at the University of Austin, he served as a professor and a senior administrator at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy for 23 years. He was also the first Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a Doctoral Fellow at the RAND Corporation.

His scholarly work includes higher education governance, finance and design; economic development, K-12 school reform, public finance and the ethics of governance and leadership. His research passion in recent years has been working to preserve economic opportunity for lower and middle income households in the U.S. He has taught public policy analysis, public finance, the economics of education, statistics, urban economics, state and local finance, labor economics, state and local policy, and education policy. He has been a frequent television and radio contributor on political and economic issues and has appeared in numerous media outlets including CNN, Bloomberg TV, The Economist, USA Today, and many local print, radio and television programs. He has a Ph.D. in Public Policy Analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, an MBA from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from UCLA.

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Erin Davis Valdez is the Executive Director of the Incubator of the Center for Education and Public Service at the University of Austin. She has been passionate about the transformational power of education all her life, having been given the gift of being homeschooled. She taught for over a decade in Austin-area schools and served as an assistant principal at a charter school in Lewisville. These experiences have given her the opportunity to see first-hand how students can thrive when they have excellent options.

Valdez joined the Charles Koch Foundation in 2015 where she helped to grow a portfolio focused on helping innovative K12 programs grow through higher education and other partnerships. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation, she conducted research on outcomes-based funding at the secondary and postsecondary levels, civics education, and workforce programs in Texas. She has testified before the Texas and U.S. legislatures and shepherded legislation expanding educational choices for K12 and postsecondary students.

Valdez earned an M.A. in Classics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Classical Studies from Hillsdale College. She studied in Athens, Greece her junior year and worked as an excavator at the Agora archaeological site for three seasons.

Valdez has lived in the Austin area (on and off) since 1990, which counts as “native” these days. She enjoys cooking, reading, volunteering, and spending time with her husband Jeremy, her family, friends, and cocker spaniel, Scoops.

Azadeh Vatanpour is a PhD candidate at Emory University. She holds an MA in Ancient Iranian Culture and Languages from Shiraz University, an MA in Folk Studies, and an MA in Religious Studies from Western Kentucky University. As a scholar of religion and minority studies, her research focuses on ethno-religious minority groups in the Middle East, particularly among the Yarsan community.

Vatanpour is currently working on Essays on Gurani Literature, Edited Volume with Dr. Alireza Korangy, delving into the extensive repertoire of literature written in the Gurani language by various ethno-religious groups residing in the Zagros region.

Dr. Ricardo Vilalta is a professor in the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics at the University of Austin. He holds a Master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his research focuses on machine learning, statistical theory, artificial intelligence, and astroinformatics. Dr. Vilalta has received several awards, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Invention Achievement Award from IBM, the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Machine Learning, and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Before UATX, Dr. Vilalta was a professor of computer science at the University of Houston and a researcher at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Dr. Vilalta has published over a hundred papers on AI, machine learning, and its applications.