CLEAR LAB - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Research Specialist
• Research Specialist for the University of Virginia 's Corruption Lab

Brandon Shulleeta is a research specialist for the University of Virginia's Corruption Lab on Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law. He analyzes government spending tied to COVID-19, enhancing accountability and transparency, while shining light on corruption. As an investigative journalist, Shulleeta has written more than 2,500 published articles, earning several national and statewide awards, including for investigative reporting, breaking news and data journalism. He's had beats covering government, education, courts and crime. He's a former staff reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Daily Progress and a news correspondent for Reuters, with news articles published by the Chicago Tribune, Poynter, Los Angeles Times and many other news outlets. He has a master's degree in multimedia journalism and a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism. He's taught a wide array of college journalism courses on newsgathering, interviewing and writing as a professor at Randolph-Macon College and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Job Titles:

• Principal Investigator
• Associate Professor of Politics, Director of UVA 's Quantitative Collaborative

Daniel W. Gingerich is Associate Professor of Politics specializing in comparative politics and Director of UVa's Quantitative Collaborative. He also co-directs UVa-Clear (Corruption Laboratory for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law). Gingerich's research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of corruption and clientelism in Latin America as well as developing new methodologies to study these phenomena. He has published articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Economics and Politics, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He is the author of Political Institutions and Party-Directed Corruption in South America: Stealing for the Team (Cambridge University Press, series: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). This book was selected as runner-up for the 2014 William H. Riker Book Award by the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association, awarded to "the best book on political economy published during the past three calendar years." Gingerich is also the sole principal investigator on a large scale, NSF funded project entitled "Can Institutions Cure Clientelism? Assessing the Impact of the Australian Ballot in Brazil." (SES-1119908). This project provides a rigorous examination of how the transition from the nominal to effective secret vote shapes the nature of political representation by focusing on the historical experience of Brazil before and after the Australian Ballot (AB) was introduced in this county. Prior to coming to Virginia, Gingerich held a fellowship at Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. During the 2012-2013 academic year, he was a Visiting Scholar in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Law and the Roy L. and Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Professor of Law

Job Titles:

• Historian
• Assistant Professor of History and American Studies

David Singerman is a historian of capitalism, the environment, and science and technology. His current research examines the American sugar empire of the late nineteenth century, showing how corruption and monopoly power in the United States were shaped by struggles for control of labor and nature in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawai'i. He has written for the New York Times and the Atlantic online and published articles in Radical History Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of British Studies, and Enterprise & Society. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Chemical Heritage Foundation, among others. In 2015 his dissertation was awarded prizes for best dissertation in business history by the Business History Conference and the Association of Business Historians (UK). Before coming to UVA he was a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University and a research associate at Harvard Business School.

Hellman was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2005-06) and the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2004-05). She was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1999 and was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2007-08 and at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2011.

Jan Vogler joined the CLEAR Lab as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Political Economy of Good Government (Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics & the Democracy Initiative). He recently completed his Ph.D. in political science-with a specialization in political economy and political methodology-at Duke University. His dissertation is entitled, "The Political Economy of Public Bureaucracy: The Emergence of Modern Administrative Organizations." Prior to earning his Ph.D., Jan received a B.A. in political science from the Free University of Berlin and a M.Sc. (with distinction) in international relations (research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. While completing his undergraduate degree, he studied economics as an additional minor and spent one year at the University of California, Berkeley. At UVA, he is working on a number of topics, including state-citizen interactions, the interruption of self-government, and the quality of public institutions.

Job Titles:

• Historian
• Postdoctoral Research Associate

Jessica Ann Levy is a historian of politics, racism, and business in the United States and Africa. Her current book project, Black Power, Inc.: Corporate America, Race, and Empowerment Politics in the U.S. and Africa, under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press (Modern American Politics & Culture Series), examines the rise of black empowerment politics, including government and private programs promoting black entrepreneurship, job-training, and other kinds of commercial activity during the late twentieth-century. The dissertation on which this book is based was awarded the the 2019 Betty Unterberger Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Levy's research has received the support from numerous institutions, including the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Hagley Library, the German Historical Institute, and the Johns Hopkins' Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Prior to coming to UVA, Levy was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2018. She also earned an M.A. in Social Science from The University of Chicago.

Job Titles:

• Professor

Michael D. Gilbert is Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on election law, legislation, and law and economics. His current research focuses on constitutional entrenchment, campaign finance law, corruption and the design of courts. He is working on a book-length project on public law and economics. His research has appeared in multiple law reviews, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he has lectured throughout the United States and around the world, including in Ecuador, Germany and Israel. Prior to joining the faculty, Gilbert clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and he received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School. At Berkeley, Gilbert served as an articles editor on the California Law Review and received multiple distinctions, including an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics and a grant from the National Science Foundation. In 2015 he won the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award.

Job Titles:

• Graduate Student, Fellow

Job Titles:

• Professor of Law at the University of Virginia

Michael D. Gilbert is Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He teaches courses on election law, legislation, and law and economics. His current research focuses on constitutional entrenchment, campaign finance law, corruption and the design of courts. He is working on a book-length project on public law and economics. His research has appeared in multiple law reviews, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he has lectured throughout the United States and around the world, including in Ecuador, Germany and Israel. Prior to joining the faculty, Gilbert clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley, and he received his J.D. from Berkeley Law School. At Berkeley, Gilbert served as an articles editor on the California Law Review and received multiple distinctions, including an Olin Fellowship in Law and Economics and a grant from the National Science Foundation. In 2015 he won the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Law at the University of Virginia

Deborah Hellman is the David Lurton Massee, Jr., Professor of Law and the Roy L. and Rosamond Woodruff Morgan Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. There are two main strands to Hellman's work. The first focus on equal protection law and its philosophical justification. She is the author of When is Discrimination Wrong? (Harvard University Press, 2008) and co-editor of The Philosophical Foundations of Discrimination Law (Oxford University Press, 2013) and several articles related to equal protection. The second strand focuses on the relationship between money and legal rights. This includes articles on campaign finance law, bribery and corruption, each of which explore and challenge the normative foundations of current doctrine. Her article "A Theory of Bribery" won the 2019 Fred Berger Memorial Prize (for philosophy of law) from the American Philosophical Association.

Job Titles:

• Research Specialist
• Research Specialist for the University of Virginia 's Corruption Lab

Rui Cao is a research specialist for the University of Virginia's Corruption Lab on Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law. She analyzes and visualizes data on government's COVID-19-related loans to business to shed light on dynamics of government's corruption and accountability in crisis time. Prior to joining the CLEAR Lab, Rui worked as a Data Analyst at Ocula Data, focusing on comparing different treatment effects on diabetes as well as ETF trends prediction and validation. She had also worked at Randstad as a Financial Data Specialist, conducting the company's performance measurement, analytics, and prediction. Rui earned a Master of Science degree in Business Analytics at Brandeis University. She has substantial experience in data analysis, machine learning, and predictive analytics in the healthcare and finance industries. She possesses high proficiency in R, Python, Tableau, PySpark, and SQL.

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor
• Associate Professor, Department of Economics

Sandip Sukhtankar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2009, and a BA from Swarthmore College (with Highest Honors) in 2000.

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of Economics
• Development Economist

Shan Aman-Rana is a development economist interested in understanding the state capacity constraint on development. Her research mainly focuses on organizational economics of public sector workers in developing countries. Her current research investigates discretionary allocations in a bureaucracy in Pakistan and shows that when senior bureaucrats have the discretion to promote juniors, they do so meritocratically. Aman-Rana's research has been funded by STICERD and International Growth Centre (IGC) in the UK, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) in Pakistan and United Stated Institute of Peace. She was awarded Best Teaching Fellow Award in the Economics Tripos (2012-13), University of Cambridge and London School of Economics (LSE) Best Class Teacher Award (2016). She was also nominated for LSE Student-led Most Inspirational Teacher Award (2016). She holds a Ph.D, MRes and MSc. in Economics from the London School of Economics (LSE). Before coming to the UK she worked as a Pakistan Administrative Services (PAS) bureaucrat collecting taxes, adjudicating on revenue matters and dealing with complaints of the citizens against the political establishment, among other things. She is affiliated with STICERD, Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme (EOPP) LSE, International Growth Centre (IGC) and Bissau Economics Lab (BELAB). At UVA she will be part of the Democracy Initiative. This fall she is teaching Development Economics (ECON 4610).

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Job Titles:

• Research Scholar and a Visiting Professor
• Visiting Professor of Practic

Vineet Kapoor is a visiting research scholar and a visiting professor at UVA. He is a member of Indian Police Service who has worked in various police jurisdictions in India and with the UN Department for Peace Keeping Operations. Kapoor has an expertise in Police Reforms, Human Rights, Police Training and Law Enforcement related Research. He earned his Ph.D. in Human Rights and its relationship with Police Education and Organizational Development.