James E. Clyburn is the Assistant Democratic Leader in the United States House of Representatives and Chairman of the Democratic Faith Working Group. He previously served in the post from 2011 to 2018 and served as Majority Whip from 2007 to 2010 and 2019 to 2022, making him the first African American to serve multiple terms as Majority Whip. A native son of South Carolina, Clyburn has represented the state’s Sixth Congressional District since 1993.

When he came to Congress in 1993, Congressman Clyburn was elected co-president of his freshman class. He was subsequently elected Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Vice Chair, and Chair, of the House Democratic Caucus. From 2011 to 2018, he served as Assistant Democratic Leader. In addition to serving as Whip, Congressman Clyburn chairs the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Dedicated to making America’s greatness accessible and affordable for all citizens, his 10-20-30 federal funding formula - initially applied to three programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - has been expanded to 15 accounts of the appropriations bills. Additionally, his Rural Energy Savings Program provides loans to families and businesses to implement durable, cost-effective energy efficiency measures. His “Accessible, Affordable Broadband for All” bill was included in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill and is funded at a level of $65 billion.

The recipient of 36 honorary degrees, Congressman Clyburn has received numerous awards including: the Lyndon Baines Johnson Liberty and Justice for All Award in 2015; the Harry S Truman Foundation’s Good Neighbor Award in 2021; and the NAACP’s highest honor – the Spingarn Medal – in 2022.

Since November 2022, Ronnie Chatterji has served as the Lead Coordinator for the Implementation of the CHIPS and Science Act at the White House. He also currently serves as Acting Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the Biden Administration. His role in this position is, in part, to establish “consistency and synergy between the CHIPS and Science Act and all the other things the administration is doing, like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Plan.”

Prior to serving in this role, from 2021 - 2022, Ronnie served as the Chief Economist at the US Department of Commerce. From 2010 - 2011, Ronnie served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently on leave from the Fuqua School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is the Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor of Business and Public Policy. Ronnie received his Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.

Olugbenga Ajilore is a senior advisor in the Office of the Undersecretary for Rural Development at the United States Department of Agriculture. Prior to his current role, he was a senior economist at the Center for American Progress and former associate professor of economics at the University of Toledo. His expertise includes regional economic development, macroeconomic policy, and issues in diversity and inclusion. He has been invited to testify before Congress and has been featured in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He holds a Ph.D in economics from Claremont Graduate University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Renee Bowen is a professor of Economics at UC San Diego. She is the Founding Director of the Center for Commerce and Diplomacy, is an Economic Theory Fellow at the Society for the Advances in Economic Theory, has published in top economics journals including the American Economic Review, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review: Insights, Journal of Economic Literature and the Review of International Organizations. She has held positions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institution, the World Bank, J.P. Morgan Securities, the Inter-American Development Bank, and is currently a member of the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, where she chaired the Workforce Development Subcommittee.

She holds a PhD in Economics from Georgetown University, and a BSc in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her recent research examines the design of global multilateral institutions and polarization of beliefs in societies.

Dr. Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the former Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the former President of the American Society of Health Economists. He has published more than 180 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text in its 7th edition, Health Care Reform, a graphic novel, and Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream (with Simon Johnson).

During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. From 2003-2006 he was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and during 2009-2010 he served as a technical consultant to the Obama Administration and worked with both the Administration and Congress to help craft the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011 he was named “One of the Top 25 Most Innovative and Practical Thinkers of Our Time” by Slate Magazine. In both 2006 and 2012 he was rated as one of the top 100 most powerful people in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine. In 2020 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Mark Muro is a Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro, focusing on the interplay of technology, people, and place as they are altered by positive and negative disruptions.

Mark’s recent work has focused on the embrace by the U.S. federal government of what Mark calls “place-based industrial strategy,” including through the government’s Regional Tech Hubs initiative. This work has drawn on Muro’s work on regional “growth centers,” a strategy by which the nation seeks to unlock innovation and growth in new places across America. Mark’s work on these issues looks closely at the interplay of federal strategy and state and regional delivery.

In addition to his national work, Mark’s work with states most recently entailed a reform agenda for Pennsylvania innovation policy.

More broadly, Mark’s research has revolved around the geography of the digital economy, including as it involves the diverging fortunes of “superstar” cities and “places left behind.”

Current work from Muro explores the geography of the AI economy and inclusive tech, building on earlier reports such as: “What jobs are affected by AI?,” “Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How machines are affecting people and places,” and “Digitalization and the American workforce.”

Elisabeth B. Reynolds is a Lecturer in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning in

Innovation and Competitiveness. She was former Special Assistant to President Biden for Manufacturing and Economic Development at the National Economic Council until October, 2022. During her time at the White House, she helped lead the Administration’s work on supply chain resilience, national manufacturing strategy, regional economic development and the broader industrial policy agenda. Before working in the Biden Administration, Reynolds was the executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center from 2010-2021 and co-led the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future. Reynolds’ work and research focus on manufacturing-related issues including growing innovative firms to scale and digital technology adoption by small and large firms.

She has worked on rebuilding manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. at the federal and state level, including with the Obama Administration’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) and serving on state advanced manufacturing strategy committees for several MA Governors.

She sits on the board of the non-profit, Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, one of the 16 Manufacturing USA innovation institutes.

Reynolds received her B.A. from Harvard, a Master’s in Economics from the University of Montreal and a Ph.D. from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Danny Yagan is an Associate Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Associate of the Berkeley Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and Faculty Co-Director of the Taxation and Inequality Initiative of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. In 2018 he was awarded a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship for early-career contributions. His work has been supported by the Sloan Foundation, Arnold Foundation, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and centers at Berkeley, UC Davis, Rutgers, and Harvard. He joined the department after earning a BA summa cum laude and a PhD in economics from Harvard.

Patrick Kennedy is a public economist, studying the aggregate and distributional effects of major public policies using tools from public finance, labor, and trade. Kennedy’s research has considered business taxes, tariffs and protection, and place-based policies, in the context of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Us-china Trade War, and Opportunity Zones, respectively.

Kennedy completed his PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley in 2023, and will join the National Bureau of Economic Research as a Fellow studying long-term fiscal policy this fall. In the 2024 academic year, he will join the economics department at UC Los Angeles as an assistant professor in 2024.

Scott Andes leads the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, a $1 billion regional economic development competition in the Economic Development Administration. On September 2nd, President Biden announced the 21 regional winners of the program. Prior to EDA, Scott was the Executive Director of the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University, a research center that applies artificial intelligence to address societal challenges. He created and ran a new program at the National League of Cities that partnered with over 100 mayors to create local entrepreneurships policies and programs. Scott was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation where he published over 100 research reports and articles on innovation-based economic development. Scott served as Special Assistant to Senator Chuck Schumer at the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and has worked on numerous national political campaigns. He has degrees from the London School of Economics and Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife Sasha and son Max.

Tim Bartik’s research focuses on how broad-based prosperity can be advanced through better local labor market policies. This includes both policies affecting labor demand, such as state and local economic development policies, and policies affecting labor supply, such as place-based scholarships.

Bartik’s 1991 book, Who Benefits from State and Local Economic Development Policies?, is widely cited as an important and influential review of the evidence on how local policies affect economic development. Bartik is co-editor of Economic Development Quarterly, the only journal focused on local economic development in the United States.

Bartik’s recent work on economic development includes research developing a database on economic development incentive programs around the U.S. He has also developed a simulation model of incentives’ benefits and costs for local residents’ incomes, and how these benefits and costs vary with incentive design, local economic conditions, and how incentives’ budget costs are paid for.

Bartik received both his PhD and his MS in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1982. He earned a BA from Yale University in political philosophy in 1975. Prior to joining the Upjohn Institute in 1989, he was an assistant professor of economics at Vanderbilt University.

Ellen Harpel is the founder of Smart Incentives (www.smartincentives.org), which helps state and local governments make sound decisions throughout the economic development incentives process.

Launched in 2013, Smart Incentives works with states and communities to design and implement policies that enable them to achieve better outcomes through their incentive programs. Smart Incentives is also at the forefront of efforts to develop more robust processes for monitoring compliance and evaluating the effectiveness of incentive programs.

Josh Goodman helps lead research on fiscal management and place-based economic development programs as part of Pew’s state fiscal health project. Goodman has served as a primary author for Pew studies that examine how states should evaluate tax incentives and maintain budget discipline when implementing those incentives. Goodman was previously a staff writer for Stateline, a Pew initiative that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.

Before joining Pew, he covered state and local government for Governing magazine.

Goodman holds a bachelor’s degree in politics from the University of Virginia.

Carlianne Patrick is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Her work investigates how local variation in economic incentives and other conditions affect economic agents, including work on the effect of, and theoretical justification for, policies aimed at altering firm decisions, such as where to locate (i.e., economic development policies). Her work also explores the effect of local public goods and tax policies on households' location decisions and housing, and how locational characteristics influence labor market outcomes.

Carlianne’s research has been published in journals such as Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Economic Inquiry, and The National Tax Journal. She is a recipient of the 2020 Geoffrey J.D. Hewings Award, 2016 Miernyk Research Excellence Medal, the 2014 Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Dean’s Early Career Award, Charles M. Tiebout Prize in Regional Science, Barry M. Moriarty Prize, W.E. Upjohn Foundation Early Career Award, and Regional Science Association International Dissertation Award.