MEA 2011 Annual Conference

Speakers

The MEA Annual Conference will be held on Friday, October 14, at Hamline University. Speakers include:

  • Brenda CassilliusBrenda Cassillius, Minnesota Commissioner of Education

    Cassellius was appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton on December 31, 2010. In her 20-year career as a classroom teacher, administrator and superintendent in school systems in both Minnesota and Tennessee, she led reform, redesign and change efforts that put students first, focused on achievement, and resulted in better outcomes for all students. She was most recently the superintendent of the East Metro Integration District, where she led an achievement agenda with the 10 district superintendents. Previously, as an associate superintendent in the Minneapolis Public Schools, she led 19 middle and high schools and was responsible for the implementation of the Minneapolis Secondary Redesign. As the academic superintendent of middle schools in Memphis, Tenn., she was responsible for middle school and district reforms that led to accelerated gains and the narrowing of achievement gaps among students in Memphis. Cassellius received her B.A. in psychology at the University of Minnesota and her Ed.D. from the University of Memphis.

  • Jonathan HeathcoteJonathan Heathcote, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

    Heathcote has been a senior economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 2008. Before that, he was an economist in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and on the faculty of the Department of Economics at Georgetown University as an associate professor. He has also served as an assistant professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and Duke University and as a visiting assistant professor at the Stern School of Business, New York University. His work has appeared in several publications, including the International Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Theory. He is currently an editor of the Berkeley Electronic Journal of Macroeconomics and an associate editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics and the Journal of Monetary Economics. His research focuses on understanding the evolution of cross-sectional inequality in wages, labor supply, income, consumption, and welfare. Heathcote received a B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics from Keble College, Oxford University and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Robert MeyerRobert Meyer, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin

    Meyer is a research professor and senior scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. He is known for his research on value-added modeling and evaluation methods and is currently working on projects funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences, the Joyce Foundation, the Milwaukee Public Schools, the National Science Foundation and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Over the past decade and a half, he has worked closely with districts and states to develop and apply innovative statistical methods. He has conducted statistical evaluations of programs and policies such as SAGE (the Wisconsin class-size initiative), systemic reform in Texas, integrated versus traditional mathematics, and professional development and other math and science reforms in Cleveland and Riverside, California. He has also worked with numerous districts to develop and implement value-added indicator and accountability systems.

  • Roger MyersonRoger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago

    Myerson shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for their contributions to the foundations of mechanism design theory. He taught for 25 years in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University before going to the University of Chicago. He is the author of two books and many professional articles on game theory, information economics and economic analysis of political institutions. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as its Midwest vice president. He was elected as vice president of the Econometric Society in 2006. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel in 2002. Myerson holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

  • Fabrizio PerriFabrizio Perri, University of Minnesota

    Perri is an associate professor of economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota and as a consultant to the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Previously, he was the William Berkley Professor in Economics and Business at New York University and an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He specializes in international macroeconomics and finance, business cycles, labor economics and inequality, and public economics. His work has appeared in several publications, such as the Journal of the European Economic Association and the Journal of Monetary Economics. Perri received his B.A. from the Universit Bocconi in Milan, Italy, and both his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Aaron SojournerAaron Sojourner, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

    Sojourner is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in the Carlson School of Managements Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies. Previously, he served as a researcher at the Chapin Hall Center for Children, University of Chicago, and policy fellow for the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Policy Committee. He is currently working on a number of projects, including research on impacts of unionization in nursing homes and an experiment in mapping savings to retirement income. Sojourner received his B.A. in history from Yale University, masters in public policy from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.

  • Joel WaldfogelJoel Waldfogel, Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

    Waldfogel is the Frederick R. Kappel Chair in Applied Economics at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previously, he has served as a professor at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania and as a consultant for projects at the World Bank. He is the author of The Tyranny of the Market and Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays. He received the Journal of Urban Economics’ Highly Cited Author Award four years in a row. His current projects fall under the areas of intellectual property piracy and the benefits that consumers derive from differentiated product markets. His most recent focus has been on pricing of digital products, the supply of new music since Napster and globalization of the music industry. Waldfogel received his B.A. in economics from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.