Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is the director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the Margaret Walker Alexander Professor at the university. From 2015-2017, she was the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative housed at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. She is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, and a nonresident senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

Whitmore Schanzenbach studies issues related to child poverty, including education policy, child health, and food consumption. Much of her research investigates the longer-run impacts of early life experiences, such as the impacts of receiving SNAP benefits during childhood, the impacts of kindergarten classroom quality, and the impacts of early childhood education. She recently served on the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Examination of the Adequacy of Food Resources and SNAP Allotments.

This conversation was recorded in 2019. Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Diane has been researching the effects of the pandemic on food insecurity in real time. She also has created an app with an IPR summer undergraduate research assistant that tracks measures of food insecurity across all 50 states.

Our student quote is read by Aly Mariani.

Resources:

1. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach’s bio.
2. Daniel Shaviro’s blog post about her recent visit to the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium
3. Read some of Schanzenbach's blog posts.
4. Selections of Schanzenbach’s research
5. Follow Schanzenbach on Twitter: @dwschanz.
6. The student quote comes from Michael Graetz’s 2001 Erwin Griswold Lecture for the American College of Tax Counsel.