Join us for our fourth discussion of Lincoln Leads: Lockdown Edition, hosted by Dr Alan Garfinkel, on the topic of Politics. This is a series of round table discussions on themes at the intersection of disease and society: Language & Literature, Epidemiology & Public Health, Medicine, Politics, and Cognitive Epidemiology.
Dr Jody LaPorte is a Gonticas Fellow and Tutorial Fellow in Politics & International Relations at Lincoln College. She completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University, and her MA and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Lincoln, she was a lecturer at the Blavatnik School of Government and Oxford’s Department of Politics & International Relations, and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a leading think tank in Washington, DC. Her research investigates the dynamics of politics and policymaking in post-Soviet Eurasia. Her work seeks to identify how domestic and foreign pressures—such as historical legacies, patterns of corruption, and contemporary human rights norms—shape political outcomes in non-democratic contexts.
Dr Shawn Landres is Immediate Past Chair of the Los Angeles County Quality and Productivity Commission and currently leads its Productivity Investment Board, the nation’s oldest and largest local government innovation fund. He is also the Vice Chair of the City of Santa Monica Planning Commission and previously chaired Santa Monica’s Social Services Commission. Co-founder of Jumpstart Labs and recognized for his research and leadership on philanthropy and social innovation, he is helping coordinate local government efforts related to procurement and land-use streamlining, local hiring, philanthropic partnerships, each through an equity lens. Shawn read for an MSt in Social Anthropology at Lincoln, where he was a Keith Murray Graduate Scholar. He went on to obtain a PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Alexandra Brown is a second year MPhil student in economics. Her thesis studies the impact of high housing prices on the economic choices of young people in the UK. She worked for three years as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia, where she monitored global economic trends and produced GDP forecasts as inputs into monetary policy. In addition to her experience in public policy in Australia, she spent last summer doing research on mortgage credit spreads at the Bank of England.
Dr Alan Garfinkel is Newton-Abraham Visiting Professor at Lincoln College, Oxford. His permanent post is as Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) and Integrative Biology and Physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His educational background is in philosophy and mathematics. After a stint as a philosophy professor, he turned to focus on mathematical modeling as a scientific research tool. His research uses mathematical models to understand cardiac arrhythmias.
