Beth Akers is a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy. She is an expert on the economics of education, with a focus on higher education policy.

Akers’s recent writing has been on the topics of student loan debt, information in higher education and extended time-to-degree. She previously held the position of staff economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, where she worked on federal student lending policy as well as other education and labor issues.

Alan Berube is senior fellow and deputy director at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, and co-author of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Brookings Press, 2013). He has authored numerous Brookings publications on topics including metropolitan demographic and economic trends, social policies affecting low-income families and communities, and cities in the global economy.

He has authored dozens of Brookings publications, including State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation, and recent editions of the Global MetroMonitor, which tracks the economic performance of the world’s 200 largest metro economies. He served as co-author of the joint Federal Reserve/Brookings 2008 report, The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America, and the recent Brookings report, The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s.

Prior to joining Brookings in February 2001, Alan was a policy advisor in the Office of Community Development Policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, and a researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and their management, including counterinsurgency, organized crime, and illicit economies. She focuses particularly on South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, and Somalia.

Felbab-Brown is the author of Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan (The Brookings Institution Press, 2012) and Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings Institution Press, 2009) which examines military conflict and illegal economies in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, Burma, Northern Ireland, India, and Turkey.

Felbab-Brown is also the author of numerous policy reports, academic articles, and opinion pieces. She has conducted fieldwork in Afghanistan, Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Morocco, India, Nepal, and Sub-Saharan Africa. A frequent commentator in U.S. and international media, Felbab-Brown regularly provides congressional testimony on these issues.

Carol Graham is the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Graham served as Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at Brookings from 2002-2004. She has also served as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. She has been a consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, and the Harvard Institute for International Development, helping to design safety net programs in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

She is the author of The Pursuit of Happiness: Toward an Economy of Well-Being (Brookings, 2011); Happiness around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Ron Haskins is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore. From February to December of 2002 he was the senior advisor to the president for welfare policy at the White House.

Haskins is a senior editor of The Future of Children, a journal on policy issues that affect children and families. He has also co-edited several books, including Welfare Reform and Beyond: The Future of the Safety Net (2002), The New World of Welfare (2001) and Policies for America’s Public Schools: Teachers, Equity, and Indicators (Ablex, 1988), and is a contributor to numerous edited books and scholarly journals on children’s development and social policy issues. He is also the author of Show Me the Evidence (2014), Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (2006) and the co-author of Creating an Opportunity Society (2009) with Isabel Sawhill and Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America (Pew, 2008).

John Hudak is a fellow in Governance Studies and Managing Editor of the FixGov blog. His research examines questions of presidential power in the contexts of administration, personnel, and public policy. Additionally, he focuses on campaigns and elections, bureaucratic process and legislative-executive interaction.

John’s new book, Presidential Pork: White House Influence over the Distribution of Federal Grants demonstrates that pork-barrel politics occurs beyond the halls of Congress. Presidents capitalize on their discretionary funding authority to target federal dollars to swing states in advance of presidential elections. His other work explores how agency staffing, expertise, and institutional structure facilitate or hinder presidential power and influence. This research explores the balance between political control and bureaucratic expertise in the delivery of public policy.

Prior to joining Brookings, John served as the program director and as a graduate fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Elizabeth Kneebone is a fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and co-author of Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Brookings Press, 2013). Her work primarily focuses on urban and suburban poverty, metropolitan demographics, and tax policies that support low-income workers and communities. In Confronting Suburban Poverty In America, she and co-author Alan Berube address the changing geography of metropolitan poverty and offer pragmatic solutions for reforming and modernizing the nation’s policy and practice framework for alleviating poverty and increasing access to opportunity.

Philippe Le Corre is a visiting fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings. His research focuses on Asia-Europe political and economic relations, China’s foreign policy and France.

Le Corre has published widely on Asia and Europe. Recent publications include L’Offensive chinoise en Europe (Fayard – 2015, co-authored with Alain Sepulchre), the Asia chapter of L’Année Stratégique 2015 (Armand Colin, 2014); “China’s charm offensive” (Europe’s World, Spring 2011); “Partnering China” (Europe’s World, Fall 2008); “l’empire de la puissance douce?” (Foreign Policy, Fall 2007); and “Tony Blair has missed his chance to lead Europe” (Financial Times, April 1, 2004). He is the author of several books on China, including Après Hong Kong – Chinese and cosmopolitan, one country two systems? (Autrement, 1997) and Quand la Chine va au marché – Lessons of Chinese capitalism (Maxima, 1999) and published an essay on Tony Blair’s relationship with Europe: Tony Blair, les rendez-vous manqués (Autrement, 2004).

Joshua Meltzer is a fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution and is an expert on the intersection between climate change and international trade as well as the relationship between trade and U.S. competitiveness, particularly with regard to U.S. trade with key economies such as China, India, Japan and the European Union.

He has been published in several peer reviewed law and policy journals and has also testified on international trade issues before Congress and the United States International Trade Commission. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at John Hopkins University, School for Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University Law School.

Adele Morris is a fellow and policy director for Climate and Energy Economics at the Brookings Institution. Her expertise and interests include the economics of policies related to climate change, energy, natural resources, and public finance.

She joined Brookings in July 2008 from the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress, where she spent a year as a Senior Economist covering energy and climate issues.

Before the JEC, Adele served nine years with the U.S. Treasury Department as its chief natural resource economist, working on climate, energy, agriculture, and radio spectrum issues. On assignment to the U.S. Department of State in 2000, she was the lead U.S. negotiator on land use and forestry issues in the international climate change treaty process. Prior to joining the Treasury, she served as the senior economist for environmental affairs at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the development of the Kyoto Protocol. She began her career at the Office of Management and Budget, where she conducted regulatory oversight of agriculture and natural resource agencies.

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow and co-director with the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence and director of research for the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force and American foreign policy. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. His most recent book, co-written with James Steinberg, is Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: U.S.-China Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014).

John Page is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and a Director in the International Growth Centre of the London School of Economics and Oxford University.

From 1980 to 2008, Dr. Page was at the World Bank where his senior positions included: Director, Poverty Reduction, Director, Economic Policy, Chief Economist and Director, Economic and Social Development, Middle East and North Africa Region and Chief Economist of the Africa Region. Prior to his appointment at the World Bank, he was a member of the faculty at Stanford and Princeton Universities. He has held visiting professorships at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan.

He is a Research Associate at the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and has been a consultant to the African Development Bank, the Global Development Network, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the United Nations Industrial Development Program (UNIDO), the United Nations University – World Institute of Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), and the World Bank.

John Page obtained his Bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University and his Doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has published several books, including The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: 1993), Africa at a Turning Point? Growth, Aid and External Shocks (World Bank: 2008), and Breaking in and Moving Up: Industrial Challenges for the Bottom Billion and the Middle Income Countries (UNIDO: 2009). He is the author of more than eighty published articles on the economics of developing countries.

Robert Puentes is a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program where he also directs the program's Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative. The Initiative was established to address the pressing transportation and infrastructure challenges facing cities and suburbs in the United States and abroad.

Prior to joining Brookings, Robert was the director of infrastructure programs at the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. He serves on a variety of boards and committees including, most recently, New York State's 2100 Infrastructure Commission; the District of Columbia's Streetcar Financing and Governance Task Force; the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority's Technical Advisory Committee; the Tysons Corner Tomorrow Advisory Task Force; and the Falls Church, Virginia Planning Commission.