Dr. Modestino (CV) is an Associate Professor with appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University, where she also serves as the Research Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. She is currently an Affiliated Researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute Labor Economics. Previously, she was a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she conducted research on regional economic and policy issues for over a decade.

Dr. Modestino’s current research focuses on labor and health economics including youth development, skills mismatch, childcare, and the opioid crisis. Much of her research is interdisciplinary and involves large-scale empirical evaluations to determine underlying causal relationships using a variety of data, methods, and techniques. She has amassed over $10 million in external funding, including grants from Arnold Ventures, the Doris Duke Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation.

Last year, Dr. Modestino launched Community to Community (C2C): Policy Equity for All, a new $4.8 million initiative across Northeastern’s global campus network. Working in partnership with city departments, state agencies, and community based organizations C2C provides rigorous data and analysis to find solutions to the most urgent public problems at each campus location.

Dr. Modestino holds both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where she also served as a doctoral fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government.