I am the associate dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. My job involves supporting our faculty and staff in providing innovative educational experiences. Before joining the Humphrey School in August 2020, I was a professor of communication studies in the College of Liberal Arts. My research focuses on the interactions between social identities, media, and the public, and I’ve written several books and articles on these topics.

For the past several years I’ve collaborated on a variety of civic media and history projects at Gordon Parks High School in St. Paul, and in support of the Hallie Q. Brown Center Community Archive, to expand the understanding of Black history in Minnesota.

In my free time, I’m always on the outlook for interesting birds.

I am a doctoral fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on institutional responses to gender-based violence (GBV) in Ecuador. I earned my Master of Arts in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati (UC) where I conducted qualitative field research focused on how the political Left Turn in Ecuador impacted state responses to GBV in Ecuador. While working on my Master's, i was also a member of the University of Cincinnati Gender Equity Research Team, conducting a gender equity analysis of the City of Cincinnati commissioned by the City of Cincinnati Gender Equality Task Force. I graduated summa cum laude with her Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs from the University of Cincinnati. Before joining the Humphrey School, i served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay and worked as an advocate for survivors of GBV in the United States and Ecuador for ten years. When I’m not researching, i enjoy reading, cooking, and traveling.

Anna Bolgrien is a former doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs with a focus in global policy and international development. Her background is in demography and population studies with her primary research interests on the design and production of demographic data in developing countries. She applies her work to the development of research methodologies appropriate for children and youth in Tanzania, Nepal, and Brazil with the Animating Children's Views project (PI: Dr. Deborah Levison, PhD). She currently works as a Graduate Research Assistant on the IPUMS- International data project. She was also a MPC Graduate Student Predoctoral Trainee in Population Studies (2016-2019) where she pursued (and continues to research) a variety of demographic topics including infant mortality, urban slum migration, epidemics and fertility, and childhood disability.

Ragui Assaad, professor, researches education, labor policy, and labor market analysis in developing countries with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. His current work focuses on inequality of opportunity in education, labor markets, transitions from school-to-work, employment and unemployment dynamics, family formation, informality, labor market responses to economic shocks, international migration, including the effects of forced migration.

Assaad is a Research Fellow of the Economic Research Forum in Cairo, Egypt and serves on its board of trustees. He is also Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He served as Regional Director for West Asia and North Africa for the Population Council, based in Cairo, Egypt, from 2005 to 2008.

Assaad has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, the Ford Foundation, UNICEF and UNDP.

Audrey Dorélien is an assistant professor in the global policy and the social policy and policy analysis areas, and an affiliate of the Minnesota Population Center. Her research agenda strives to elucidate how human population dynamics and behavior intersect with environmental conditions to affect health. Her dissertation research documented human birth seasonality in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying the social and ecological drivers of birth seasonality and analyzing the impact of birth seasonality on infectious disease dynamics and optimal timing of pulse vaccination campaigns. Her current research focuses on the effects of early life exposures (i.e., disease/nutrition/climate) on health both in the United States and in Sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Dorélien has also conducted research on spatial demography/ urbanization with a focus on implications for health and climate change vulnerability. Her research has appeared in Population Development Review, Population Health Metrics, Biodemography and Social Biology, Demographic Research, and PLoS ONE.

Prior to joining the Humphrey faculty she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center and Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health. She earned her PhD in Public Policy from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs with a concentration in demography from the Office of Population Research.