ILR Announces Six New Faculty

The ILR School will welcome six new faculty members who begin July 1.

“The new faculty will reinforce ILR’s research strength and enable the school to continue offering an outstanding curriculum, including expanding our course offerings into new topics in the world of work,” said Alexander Colvin, Ph.D. ’99, the Kenneth F. Kahn ’69 Dean and Martin F. Scheinman ’75, M.S. ’76, Professor of Conflict Resolution at the ILR School.

Following the recent retirement of labor economists Francine Blau, Gary Fields and Lawrence Kahn, the Department of Economics will welcome Elio Nimier-David and Jason Sockin.

Established a year ago, the school's Global Labor and Work Department welcomes Paul Ortiz, Emma Teitelman and Devin Wiggs, while Forrest Briscoe joins the Department of Organizational Behavior.

The new faculty and their departments are:

Forrest Briscoe
Organizational Behavior
• Ph.D., Management (MIT Sloan)
• A.B., Environmental Science & Public Policy (Harvard)

Briscoe comes to ILR after 21 years at Penn State University, where he spent 17 years at the Smeal College of Business after a four-year stint in the Department of Labor & Employment Relations. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2017 and also held appointments in the Department of Sociology and at the Center for Health Policy Research.

His research focuses on how organizations decide to adopt new practices and strategies, and how such changes spread across industries and fields of organizations. Briscoe is especially interested in how organizational decision-makers act when there is controversy surrounding the changes they are considering and when stakeholders are advocating for and against those changes.

A second research stream focuses on the effects that new and changing organizational practices have on employees. In this work, Briscoe focuses on how changes are affecting professional employees whose traditional ways of working are being challenged and disrupted.

Elio Nimier-David
Economics
• Ph.D., Economics (Ecole Polytechnique – ENSAE Paris)
• Eng., Economics and Statistics (ENSAE)
• M.S., Economics (Paris Saclay University)
• M.S., Social Sciences (Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Paris Saclay)

Nimier-David recently concluded a postdoctoral research scholar position at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

His research lies at the intersection of labor economics, firm dynamics and spatial economics, with a strong interest in the factors that promote firm creation, firm growth and local economic activity. His work combines quasi-experimental designs with large-scale administrative data to identify the effects of major education and labor market policies on firms, individuals and cities.

Nimier-David, who was selected for the 2023 EALE Tour, is also a member of the Global Repository of Income Dynamics project, working on earnings inequality, mobility and income risk.

Paul Ortiz
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., History (Duke University)
• B.A., History, Political Economy, and the Sociology of Science (The Evergreen State College)

Ortiz will join the ILR faculty after 15 years in the history department at the University of Florida, where he held affiliate faculty memberships in African American Studies, Latin American Studies, the Center for Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies, Art & Art History and the Bob Graham Center for Public Service.

At Florida, Ortiz serves as the director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, which offers digital humanities production and experiential learning classroom and fieldwork opportunities year-round.

A third-generation U.S. military veteran, Ortiz has written several books, including An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence.

Before his time at Florida, Ortiz taught in the Department of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, between 2001-2008. He was also a visiting assistant professor in history and documentary studies at Duke University between 2000-2001.

Jason Sockin
Economics
• Ph.D., Economics (University of Pennsylvania)
• B.A., Economics and Mathematics (Stony Brook University)

Sockin is a labor economist at the U.S. Treasury who is interested in better understanding how the internet and technology have fundamentally altered how workers and firms interact in today's labor market.

He has worked as a researcher at Penn Wharton Budget Model, Glassdoor, the Congressional Budget Office, the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors.

Emma Teitelman
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., History (University of Pennsylvania)
• B.A., History (Wesleyan University)

Teitelman comes to ILR following a stint as an Assistant Professor at McGill University. A historian with a particular interest in the history of labor, inequality and state formation, especially during Reconstruction and the late-nineteenth century.

Her first book, Lumber and Lodes: The Social Reconstruction of the South and the West After the U.S. Civil War (forthcoming with Harvard University Press), is a history of capitalist power and worker politics in the wake of emancipation.

Teitelman also spent two years at Penn State, where she was an assistant research professor and the associate director of the Richards Civil War Era Center. That came after a three-year appointment as the Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge.

Devin Wiggs
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., Sociology (Northwestern University)
• M.A., Sociology (Northwestern University)
• B.A., Sociology (Augsburg University)

Wiggs earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University this spring. His thesis, “Labor’s Assets: Unions, Pensions, and Capital Strategies in the American Labor Movement,” examines unions as investors and as activists of “labor’s capital” – workers’ retirement savings – in both public and private equity markets.

Overall, Wiggs’ research moves along two fronts – investigating the activism and structures of labor movements, especially American labor unions, and examining the origins and consequences of financialization.