Dr. Alicia Sasser Modestino has been appointed the new director of the Dukakis Center for Urban & Regional Policy, where she will lead the center and provide flagship support to the center’s community-based research in Boston, Massachusetts, and across the country to pave the way forward in making real, substantive impact across Northeastern’s global network. On Thursday, May 14, 2026, Dr. Modestino will host the annual Dukakis Center Research Symposium: Now You Know: Honoring the Life and Legacy of Kitty Dukakis.
“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.”
As she prepares to step into the role, Dr. Modestino notes that the role of institutional research must adapt to such times, primarily by collaborating with community activists to uplift marginalized voices and to address the most-pressing needs across all campus communities. Dr. Modestino’s research is particularly invested in this kind of engagement, founding Community to Community (C2C): Policy Equity For All , an initiative that works across city departments, state agencies, and community organizations to find solutions to the most urgent public problems at each campus location. “As both a producer and convener of translational data-driven policy research, the Dukakis Center is uniquely poised to bridge the gap between knowledge and practice to have a positive impact on all of the places that our university calls home,” she adds. Read more about her plans for the future of the Dukakis Center here.
Dr. Modestino is succeeding former Dukakis Center director Professor Ted Landsmark, a renowned civil rights activist and professor of public policy and urban affairs at Northeastern, who had this to say about Dr. Modestino:
“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.”
Dr. Modestino is a professor of public policy and urban affairs and economics at Northeastern University, as well as serving on the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Executive Committee. She is an Affiliated Researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), 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. Professor Modestino’s current research focuses on labor and health economics, including youth development, skills mismatch, childcare, and the opioid crisis. Much of her research is interdisciplinary and involves large-scale empirical evaluations to determine underlying causal relationships using a variety of data, methods, and techniques. She has amassed over $10 million in external funding, including grants from Arnold Ventures, the Doris Duke Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. Read more about her work here.
