Biography: Samuel L. Myers, Jr., is the Director and Professor, Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Myers holds concurrent appointments in the Applied Economics Ph.D. Program and the graduate minor in population studies in the Minnesota Population Center. He maintains an affiliation with the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing, China). 

Myers has published extensively on applied microeconomic and policy issues in leading economics and interdisciplinary journals and books and monographs. He is a pioneer in the use of applied econometric techniques to examine racial disparities in crime, to detect illegal discrimination in home mortgage lending and consumer credit markets, to assess the impacts of welfare on family stability, to evaluate the effectiveness of government transfers in reducing poverty, and to detect disparities and discrimination in government contracting. He is the co-editor of a special edition of the Journal of Economic Literature focusing on race and economic modeling and the co-author of a recent paper on the marginalization of race in the economics of crime literature. 

Myers is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration; a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM); and a former president of the National Economic Association (NEA). Myers is the former chair of the National Science Foundation’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE); a past member of the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs (OJP) Science Advisory Board and a recently appointed member of the Committee on Law and Justice, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. 

He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT where his dissertation on the economics of crime was supervised by Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow, Michael Piore, and Lester Thurow. His BA in economics was awarded by Morgan State University. 

Myers' latest co-authored book, Race Neutrality: Rationalizing Remedies to Racial Inequality (2018) explores the phenomenon of racial discrimination where there are no racists. In 2021-2022, he was a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar writing a new book, Minnesota Paradox: Racial Inequality and Progressive Public Policies that provides a definitive historical account of how one of the most liberal and progressive states in the nation became a state with some of the largest racial disparities in social and economic outcomes in the nation.