Dr. Alicia Sasser Modestino Appointed Director of the Dukakis Center

The Policy School is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Alicia Sasser Modestino as Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. In this new role, Dr. Modestino will take the helm of the Dukakis Center, expanding the Center’s research model to support community-engaged research at the city, state, and regional levels and to address today’s urgent challenges facing communities across Northeastern’s global university system. In this capacity, she will host the annual Dukakis Center Research Symposium on Thursday May 14, 2026, which will honor the life’s work of Kitty Dukakis, who passed away last March.

Dr. Modestino succeeds former Dukakis Center Director Ted Landsmark, known for his policy and advocacy efforts in Greater Boston as well as his decades-long commitment to social activism. “Alicia is exceptionally well prepared to assume leadership of the Dukakis Center during this time of tumultuous national policy changes,” said Prof. Landsmark. “Her public and private sector work on employment generation, job training, data-driven research and community engagement, and her project management with our multiple campuses, establish her as a leader in higher education job creation and analysis. She sustains our commitment to social justice, equity, and access to economic development opportunities. She will be an outstanding Director of the Dukakis Center.” 

“It’s an unprecedented time and there is a lot of good policy work that needs to be done to address the critical needs of Greater Boston and the Commonwealth”

Dr. Modestino is also an Affiliated Researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute Labor Economics. Previously, she was a Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston where she conducted research on regional economic and policy issues for over a decade. She holds both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where she also served as a doctoral fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Modestino’s current research focuses primarily on labor and health economics including areas such as youth employment and training, future of work and the workforce, public health and safety, and affordable housing. Since 2018, she has been cited nearly 2,000 times and has amassed over $14 million in external funding. In recognition of her research productivity she was awarded the Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award by Northeastern University in 2022,  the inaugural Global Network Accelerator Award from Northeastern University in 2023 and was named JPAL’s Evidence Champion in 2024 for her “extraordinary contributions to the field of evidence-based policymaking.”

The Policy School recently checked in with Dr. Modestino to discuss her vision for the role and how her past work and research will inform future directions.

What are some of you short-term and long-term goals in your new role as Director?

First off, I’m really excited to be stepping into the Director role for the center at this moment. As we all know, it’s an unprecedented time and there is a lot of good policy work that needs to be done to address the critical needs of Greater Boston and the Commonwealth. In the short-term, my goal is to use the strengths of the Dukakis Center by providing data analysis, multidisciplinary research and evaluation techniques, and a policy-driven perspective to assist local leaders and community based organizations in addressing the critical challenges facing the region. As always, we will work with policymakers and practitioners to integrate thought and action into policy solutions as part of our “Engage, Think, and Do” model.

In the long-term, my goal is to build on the experience, expertise, and convening power of the Dukakis Center to make it a central hub for state and local policy research–both in Boston and across Northeastern’s global university system. The Center has a decades-long tradition of working with policymakers and practitioners to produce research evidence that has informed policy and practice to move the needle on many of today’s most pressing problems in areas such as education and workforce development, housing and neighborhoods, healthcare access, public safety, and civic engagement. Our collaborative research model supports research-practice partnerships between faculty across the university and community leaders across the Commonwealth and beyond. As both a producer and convener of translational data-driven policy research, the Dukakis Center is uniquely poised to bridge the gap between aknowledge and practice to have a positive impact on all of the places that our university calls home.  

How has some of your own work and research shaped the role’s vision?

A decade ago, I was very fortunate to receive generous funding from the William T. Grant Foundation to conduct a multi-year evaluation of Boston’s summer youth employment program. In the beginning, I was mostly focused on the research design and implementation. Little did I know that I was about to embark upon a research-practice partnership that would transform the way I approach my entire research agenda. This collaboration with the Boston Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development grew under the guidance of my program officer and other staff at William T. Grant through their annual convenings which highlighted examples of academics and government agencies working together and provided the opportuntity for meaningful feedback on my own project.

What I learned over time through my work evaluating the Boston summer jobs program was that engaging the community was vitally important to ensuring that the research findings were interpreted correctly and put to use appropriately to be able to make an impact on policy. These long-term, mutually beneficial collaborations are the most effective way to promote the production and use of rigorous and relevant research evidence. The partnership creates a dynamic feedback loop where researchers learn about the local context and the community’s needs, enabling them to provide useful insights that facilitate ground-breaking research. At the same time, community leaders have the opportunity to contribute to the research process and ensure that it is relevant and applicable to the problems they face, increasing the likelihood for meaningful change.

Yet too often researchers lack the institutional support needed to develop these long-term collaborations with community leaders. My vision is that the Dukakis Center will help build that capacity at Northeastern University through our Community to Community (C2C) Impact Lab. C2C fosters trusting relationships between academic researchers and community or government partners at each campus location. Centering the wisdom of community voices, the goal is to pursue joint research projects that can serve as a vehicle for building a sustained partnership. Building on our decades of experience in serving the Boston area, we’ve already expanded our reach to both the Oakland, CA and Portland, ME communities through a variety of projects led by our policy fellows and see grantees over the past 3 years. I see this new endeavor as a natural extension of the Center’s mission from a “think and do” tank to an “Engage, Think, and Do” accelerator that honors the distinguished legacy of public service  embodied by Michael and Kitty Dukakis.