Dr. Modestino (CV) is an Associate Professor with appointments in the Department of Economics and the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, where she also serves as the 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) at MIT, 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. She 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.

Dr. Modestino’s current research focuses primarily on labor and health economics including areas such as youth employment and training, future of work and the workforce, gender differences in the labor market, and healthcare access. 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. Since 2018, she has been cited nearly 2,000 times and has amassed roughly $14 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. In recognition of her research productivity she was awarded the Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award by Northeastern University in 2022.

In 2022, Dr. Modestino launched Community to Community (C2C), a new $4.8 million investment in community engaged research across Northeastern University’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 urgent public problems at the local level. In recognition of her leadership she received the inaugural Global Network Accelerator Award from Northeastern University in 2023 and was named JPAL’s Evidence Champion in 2024 for her “extraordinary contributions to the field of evidence-based policymaking.”

Finally, Dr. Modestino is a dedicated teacher, actively advising over 50 students in multi-generational research teams of post-doctoral, Ph.D., master’s, and undergraduate students. She also lectures in the Master’s Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy at MIT and is a co-PI on the Platforms for the Exchanges and Allocation of Resources (PEAR) NSF Research Traineeship Program. In recognition of her excellence in the classroom, she was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award from the College of Social Science and Humanities at Northeastern University in 2019.