Association for Evolutionary Economics

Candidate Biographies

Gary Dymski

Gary Dymski is Professor of Applied Economics at the Leeds University Business School, a position he took up in 2012 after 22 years in the University of California system. His research agenda focuses on a range of issues, including: inequality and stratification; gender and racial discrimination, as well as redlining, in credit markets; urban and national economic development; financial instability and financial crisis; banking and financial regulation; and most recently the problems of hegemony and power in global finance. Before beginning his academic career, Gary was economic analyst with the Legal Services Organization of Indiana and then staff director and fiscal analyst for the Democratic Caucus in the Indiana State Senate. He earned his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was on the faculty at the University of Southern California before joining the faculty at the University of California, Riverside. Between 2003 and 2009, he served as founding executive director of the University of California Center, Sacramento, a UC-system-wide academic policy centre in California’s state capitol. At Leeds, he has gotten involved in interdisciplinary research, especially with ecologists and engineers, on issues of sustainability, inequality, infrastructure, and social provisioning. He has been involved in European policy research and, in the UK, in two national research initiatives: he led the ‘institutions’ research hub for the ESRC Rebuilding Macroeconomics project (2017-2020), and was a co-investigator for the just-concluded ESRC Productivity Insights Network project (2018-2021). Both projects sought to introduce new approaches to policy-making that build in considerations of regional-rebalancing, inequality, and ecological and social sustainability. Gary was a member of the 2018-2020 project of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the Commission on a Gender-Equal Economy. He is an external advisor to the Debt and Development division of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. He’s published nearly 200 articles and chapters and has been a visiting scholar at universities in 8 countries.

Alexandra Bernasek

Alexandra Bernasek is a feminist economist in the Department of Economics at Colorado State

University. She is a full professor who has published on a variety of issues, most of which are related to gender inequality. Her research includes work on gender and self-employment, access to credit, financial decision-making, risk-taking, student loan debt, WASH and girls schooling and women’s empowerment in the Global South. Her approach to economics is intersectional paying attention to issues of class, gender and race/ethnicity. She has served a number of terms on the AFEE Board and the EEA Board. She has published in the JEI including a recent article on student loan debt and outcomes for college students who graduated in the Great Recession. Her exposure to institutional economics in particular was critical to both her research and teaching. She teaches courses on gender in the economy, economic development, the history of economic thought and senior seminars on topics such as student loan debt, the economic impacts of COVID-19, and inequality. She has been the major advisor for many PhD students over the last 29 years, most of whom obtained jobs in academia as heterodox economists. Recently she has become interested in behavioral economics and how it intersects with feminist and institutional economics, in particular as that relates to capitalism, the pandemic and people’s health status.

Tanweer Akram

Dr. Tanweer Akram is a financial economist with over 15 years of experience in financial services, banking, asset management, insurance, credit rating agency, economic forecasting, multinational corporations, and international financial institutions. He has over 15 years of expertise in macroeconomics and investment with a strong record of 25+ publications in finance and economics journals. His economic research attempts to apply the insights of John Maynard Keynes, Hyman Minsky, post Keynesian economics, and modern money theory to current policy issues and debates in macroeconomics and finance.

Dr. Akram is Senior Vice President/Senior Economist at Citibank, where he leads development of the bank’s U.S. and international economic outlook and assessment of risks. He is responsible for forecasting key macroeconomic variables. He manages a team of macroeconomists engaged in the firm-wide economic scenario generation process and stress testing. Prior to joining Citibank, he severed as international economist for Wells Fargo and General Motors. He was the director of global public policy and economics at Thrivent. He has also worked as an economist for Voya Investment Management, Moody’s Analytics, the World Bank, Kearney, and the International Monetary Fund. He was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Dialogue, Dhaka, Bangladesh where he conducted research on the privatization of state-owned enterprises. He has taught at Barnard College of Columbia University, NY, and North South University, Bangladesh.

Dr. Akram has published more than 25 papers in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, such as Applied Economics, Annals of Financial Economics, Asian Development Review, Business Economics, Economic Modelling, Journal of Asian Business, Journal of Economic Issues, Journal of Emerging Markets, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Macroeconomics and Finance in Emerging Market Economies, PLOS ONE, PSL Quarterly Review, Savings and Development, and The American Economist. He has contributed more than 20 papers in the Levy Economics Institute’s working paper series.  Dr. Akram earned a BA from Grinnell College, Iowa. He obtained a MS in economics from the London School of Economics, United Kingdom, and a PhD in economics from Columbia University, New York.

Scott Carson

Scott Carson completed his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Utah, where is studied under EK Hunt and John Greene.  He is an economics professor at the University of Texas, Permian Basin since 1999, and since 2003 is a summer visiting economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  He has published in the Journal of Economic Issues, Journal of Institutional Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Economics & Human Biology, Demography, and Journal of Institutional & Theoretical Economics.  Since 2006, he is a Research Fellow at the University of Munich’s CESifo, and his research interests include labor and health economics, anthropometrics, financial markets, and economic development.  He served as the Social Science Journal’s editor from 2011 to 2015 and the Western Social Science Association’s general economics representative from 2007 through 2015.  He currently serves as the Associate for Evolutionary Economics Finance Committee chair.  His teaching interests span economics, from the philosophy and history of economic thought to econometrics and most points in between.  He highly values and is influenced by his relationships with AFEE members, especially Jim Peach, John Komlos, Rick Adkisson, and Reynold Nesiba.

Barbara Hopkins

Barbara Hopkins is a professor of economics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.  She is a feminist radical institutional economist focusing on the interplay between gender and economic systems. She has served on the boards for AFIT and ASE.  She has been president of AFIT.  She has served on the nominating committee for AFEE and IAFFE.  She teaches courses in comparative capitalism, problems of economic development, comparative systems of the Global South, political economy, and gender and public policy at Wright State University. She has published in Feminist Economics, Journal of Economic Issues, Feminist Studies, Review of Political Economy, Review of Radical Political Economics and in several edited volumes including Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems: Practical Utopias for an Age of Global Crisis and Austerity.

Thomas Lambert

I am Assistant Professor Term and an applied economist with the College of Business at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Ky and have mostly taught economics and business statistics there the last few years.  Before that I taught public policy and public administration for the Master of Public Administration program at Northern Kentucky University for 5 years.  I have also taught business and economics courses for the Indiana University system.  My research includes publications in the areas of economics and public policy over the last 23 years or so, and have appeared in Social Science Quarterly, Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of Economic Issues, and the Cambridge Journal of Economics among others.   I have a BA in Political Science and MBA from the University of Louisville, a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Kentucky, and a PhD in Urban and Public Affairs from the University of Louisville with a concentration in local economic development.  

I am interested in serving on the AFEE board to try to help AFEE membership grow and to help disseminate as much information as possible to others about heterodox economics and heterodox degree programs.  I am also a member of the Association of Heterodox Economists (AHE) and the AEA. 

Yeva Nersisyan

Yeva Nersisyan is an Associate Professor of economics at Franklin and Marshall College and a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. She received her B.A. in economics from Yerevan State University in Armenia, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and mathematics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is a macroeconomist working in the Modern Money Theory, Post Keynesian and Institutionalist traditions. Her research interests include banking and financial instability, fiscal and monetary theory and policy. She has published a number of papers on the topics of shadow banking, fiscal policy, government deficits and debt, and the Green New Deal. Currently, Yeva is co-editing the Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory with L. Randall Wray.

Susan Schroeder

Dr. Susan K. Schroeder is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney.  She holds a BS in Mathematics and MA and PhD degrees in Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York.  Susan spent nearly 5 years with the market research firm Towne-Oller/Information Resources, Inc. as an analyst and project manager for the consumer products industry.  She has taught and/or conducted research at the Cooper Union for Advanced Science and Art (New York), the Hochschule and University of Bremen (Germany), Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand) and the University of Sydney (Australia).  Susan is a lifetime member of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge and a consultant for the United Nations (CEPAL/ECLAC).  She researches on the topic of financial fragility, country and sovereign risk, heterodox fiscal and monetary policies, history of economic thought, political economy, and economic methodology.  Her publications have appeared in the Journal of Economic Issues, the Journal of Economic Surveys, and the Economic and Labour Relations Review; her book publishers include Springer and Palgrave Macmillan. She has contributed to AFEE’s committees for international and regional conferences and information technology.

Timothy Wunder

Timothy Wunder is a Clinical Professor of Economics in the College of Business at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He received his Ph.D. degree in Economics from Colorado State University, in 2003 and joined UTA in 2007. His work has appeared in the International Review of Economics Education, Forum for Social Economics, Journal for Economic Issues as well as elsewhere.  Timothy has served on the board of directors of AFEE for two terms and has served on the editorial board of the JEI several times. 

I am motivated to serve on the AFEE board because I love institutional economics, and the Association for Evolutionary Economics is my home.  I am still amazed that I have been making a living doing economics for the past 20 years, and throughout that time I have had the honor of being influenced by and, hopefully, influencing the institutional community.  I have served on the AFEE BOD before and, frankly, I had a lot of fun working with the people.  I owe this community a major debt and I hope that, by serving on the board, I can pay a small part of that debt back.  I have thought about running for higher AFEE office, but my life situation is such that I simply don’t have the ability to do so currently, but I still would like to contribute.  I am not the most social of people however, during the online January conference, I realized I truly missed being with the other members of our community.  Being online simply is not the same as being together in person and that feeling of absence made me consider running for the board again.  It is that feeling of belonging makes me want to work towards ensuring the continuation of this community.  I want to help create a home where future economists can find a place similar to what I was lucky enough to find.  Most importantly serving is my way of saying thank you to everybody who is part of AFEE.

Danielle Guizzo

Danielle is Senior Lecturer in Economics at the School of Economics, University of Bristol (UK). Her research expertise is on the areas of history of economics, political economy and economics education, currently working on projects related to the history and dissemination of heterodox economics, the history of economics policymaking, and the histories of women economists in post-war planning. She has published a co-authored book entitled What is Heterodox Economics? Conversations with Leading Economists (Routledge, 2019), and has published widely in field journals in political economy, history of economic thought and economics education. Danielle is a co-founder and steering group member of D-Econ: Diversifying and Decolonising Economics, also serving as a management committee member of the Association for Heterodox Economics and as an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic Issues.

Brian Lin

I have taught in the Department of Public Finance at National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taipei, Taiwan since August 1997. My broad research interests include institutional economics, macroeconomics, sustainable development, ecological economics, and public economics. I have researched the circular economy and sustainability issues for more than 10 years, and have published a series of related articles including “A Circular Economy Model of Economic Growth” with Donald A.R. George and Yunmin Chen in Environmental Modelling & Software and “Sustainable Growth: A Circular Economy Perspective” in Journal of Economic Issues. My current research focuses on the theoretical modeling of the circular economy and the institutional analysis of China’s economic development.

I am currently an Associate Editor for Journal of Economic Surveys (June 2012 - present). In 2017, I co-edited a Journal of Economic Surveys special issue book with Siqi Zheng entitled Environmental Economics and Sustainability. Over the past decade, I have also lectured widely on the circular economy and sustainability issues in Taiwan, Japan, China and South Korea. In 2005, I visited Augustana University as a Fulbright scholar. From February 2012 to July 2014, I was on leave from NCCU and served as the fourth Dean of the College of Management at the National United University (NUU) in Miaoli, Taiwan. I chaired the NCCU Department of Public Finance from August 2007 to July 2011 and from August 2015 to July 2018. Having made it my goal to help students realize their full potential, I have done my utmost to enhance administrative procedures for aspiring students.

To promote sustainability and environmental education, I have frequently led my students on field trips and to participate in various kinds of activities such as organizing the local community to plant trees, to observe Earth Day, to clean up polluted rivers, and so on. On previous field trips to remote areas and indigenous villages, my students have often remarked that they felt like the child protagonists in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Raised in Changhua County, Taiwan, I received my bachelor’s degree in Economics from National Taiwan University (NTU) in 1988, my master’s degree in Economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) in 1992, and my doctorate in Economics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 1996.

Franklin Obeng-Odoom

Franklin Obeng-Odoom is currently the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science Associate Professor at Global Development Studies, the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is a Fellow of the Teachers' Academy, the highest recognition bestowed on distinguished teachers at the university. A winner of the global Deborah Gerner Innovative Teaching Award for 'effective...pedagogy that engages students with issues of war, peace, identity, sovereignty, security, and sustainability - economic, environmental, or ethical - as they are evolving in the 21st century', Dr. Obeng-Odoom previously taught at various universities in Australia, including the University of Technology Sydney where he was Director of Higher Degree Research Programmes.

Obeng-Odoom's research interests are centred on the political economy of development, urban and regional economics, natural resources and the environment, fields in which he has published six sole-authored books, including Global Migration Beyond Limits (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty (University of Toronto Press, 2021), and Property, Institutions, and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), a winner of the European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy Joan Robinson Best Book Prize.

An active member of the AFEE community, Obeng-Odoom has published in periodicals such as the Journal of Economic Issues, Revue de la régulation. Capitalisme, Institutions, Pouvoir , and Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review. Obeng-Odoom is Associate Editor of the Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, Associate Editor of the Forum for Social Economics, and Series Editor of the Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy. He serves on the membership Committee of AFEE.

The recipient of a number of reputable research awards, Obeng-Odoom is an Inaugural International Science Council World Social Science Fellow and a former Visiting Research Fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. In 2015, Dr. Obeng-Odoom was elected to the Fellowship of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, becoming the youngest Fellow of the oldest learned society in postcolonial Africa.