Alicia Sasser Modestino 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 also a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Woman and Public Policy Program, a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, and an Affiliated Researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT. Previously, Dr. Modestino was a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she led numerous research projects on regional economic and policy issues for over a decade.

Dr. Modestino’s current research focuses on labor and health economics including youth development, changing employer skill requirements, 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 $8 million in external funding, including grants from the Arnold Foundation, J-PAL, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Social Innovation Fund, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed publications and her research has been covered extensively in the media. In her capacity as Research Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, she has developed robust researcher-practitioner partnerships with both city and state agencies to translate her research findings into new policies and practices.

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.