Thad Kousser is professor of political science and co-director of the Yankelovich Center at the University of California, San Diego. He has served as a legislative aide in the California, New Mexico, and U.S. Senates. He is the author of Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism, coauthor of The Power of American Governors and The Logic of American Politics, and coeditor of The New Political Geography of California and recent editions of Politics in the American States. Kousser has been awarded the UCSD Academic Senate's Distinguished Teaching Award, has served as coeditor of the journals State Politics and Policy Quarterly and Legislative Studies Quarterly. Jamila Michener is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and Co-Director of the Center for Health Equity. Her research focuses on poverty, racial inequality and public policy in the United States. Her book, Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism and Unequal Politics (Cambridge University Press) examines how Medicaid--the nation's public health insurance program for people with low income--affects democratic citizenship. Michener's research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Ford Foundation. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and her undergraduate degree from Princeton University. Prior to working at Cornell, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at the University of Michigan. Caroline Tolbert is a Distinguished University Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. She was named a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow for her research on voting and state election laws. She is coauthor of Accessible Elections: How State Governments Can Help Americans Vote (2020) and Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities (2021), both with Oxford University Press. The latter won the 2022 Goldsmith Prize for the best book from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She is coauthor of three other books on technology and politics, including Digital Cities, Digital Citizenship, and Virtual Inequality: Beyond the Digital Divide. Digital Citizenship was ranked one of 20 best-selling titles by the American Library Association. She has published widely on political participation, voter turnout, elections, and public opinion. Funded by the National Science Foundation and others, her work seeks to strengthen American democracy and increase participation in politics.
