Leadership Team

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Criminology and Criminal Justice; Director, Boston Area Research Initiative

Dan O’Brien’s work focuses on the ways that researchers, policymakers, and practitioners can work together to leverage modern digital data (i.e., “Big Data”) to better understand and serve cities. He also focuses on the behavioral and social dy…

Founding Director; Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Christopher Winship is the Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Progra…

Founding Director; Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University

Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Founding Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative. A former President of the American Society of Criminology, he is an elected member of the Nati…

Director of Research on Education; Charles Bigelow Professor of Education, Harvard University

Professor Hill is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on understanding that mechanisms that impact youths’ opportunities for upward mobility and successful postsecondary transitions. Her research has focused on parental choice and par…

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Ryan Qi Wang is an associate research director on social media of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) and studies the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. His research focuses on two interrelate…

Program Coordinator, Boston Area Research Initiative

David comes to BARI from the office of Senator Edward J. Markey, where he was the Regional Director, in which capacity he built partnerships, organized events, and communicated with and convened local stakeholders. Before that he was a Posse Scholar …

Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs; Director of Participatory Modeling and Data Science

Moira Zellner’s academic background lies at the intersection of Urban and Regional Planning, Environmental Science, and Complexity. She has served as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator in interdisciplinary projects examining how specifi…

Associate Director for Civic Research

Kim is an academic-practitioner who is committed to community-driven civic research, innovation in city-university collaborations, and leveraging our collective expertise for the social good. Kim previously served as Interim Executive Director at Met