Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Economics; Research Director, Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Northeastern University

Dr. Modestino is an Associate Professor with appointments in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Department of Economics at Northeastern University, where she also serves as the Research Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy. Her research focuses on labor market dynamics including skills mismatch, youth labor market attachment, and career pathways. She currently leads a multi-year Institutional Challenge Grant funded by the William T. Grant Foundation to evaluate the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program.

Over the coming year, Modestino will launch a new initiative across Northeastern’s global campus network: City to City (C2C): Finding Equitable Solutions to Local Policy Problems. Working in partnership with city and state agencies, C2C will provide rigorous data and analysis to find solutions to the most urgent public problems at each location.

Modestino received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University where she was also a fellow in the Inequality and Social Policy Program. She is currently a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution and an Affiliated Researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 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.