Appointed for a year-long term, the members of the FAC serve as the Institute's faculty governance team. In monthly meetings, they offer advice to the director and deputy director on the Institute's work, suggest new initiatives and events, and act as ambassadors to the faculty at large across Northwestern's schools.
Emily H. Ho, PhD, is Scientific Director of the NIH Toolbox, Lead Scientist of the NIH-funded Advancing Reliable Measurement in Decision-Making and Cognitive Aging initiative, and Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her research focuses on developing and validating health measurement tools across the lifespan, with an emphasis on detecting early neurocognitive changes associated with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. She leads the NIH Toolbox, a widely used digital assessment platform deployed at more than 1,100 institutions worldwide, and directs research to develop measures of everyday decision-making with real-world relevance. Dr. Ho's work has been funded by the NIH, NSF, and private foundations, and she has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals spanning psychology, behavioral science, and dementia research.
Sean Higgins is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research studies how technology reduces barriers to financial inclusion, and the effect of reducing these barriers on households and small businesses in developing countries. He holds a PhD in Economics, and has published his research in top journals including the American Economic Review and Journal of Finance. He is an Associate Editor at the Review of Finance and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER).
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer and director of audio journalism programming at Medill. The Chicago native is known for her reporting on segregation and inequality. For 17 years, she was a reporter and editor at WBEZ. Moore has tackled race, housing, economic development, food injustice and violence. Moore’s work has been broadcast on the BBC, Marketplace and NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. She is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. She is also co-author of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation: The Rise, Fall and Resurgence of an American Gang and Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation.
Isabella Bellezza is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She studies the intersection of national security and global trade, with a focus on border control. Her current book project, Networked Borders, examines how a post-9/11 campaign waged by the United States to push out its borders transformed — and connected — borders worldwide, with lasting implications for trade, security, and resurgent geopolitical rivalry. It is based on her dissertation, which received the American Political Science Association's 2026 Merze Tate Award for the best dissertation in International Relations, Law, and Politics. Her other research investigates the strategic uses of secrecy in international affairs, including how the public disclosure of national security intelligence shapes attitudes toward foreign policy. Wherefeasible, she brings methods from network science tobear onthese and other questions in global governance.
Linsey Seitz is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Northwestern University. Her research uses tools at the interface of electrocatalysis and spectroscopy to investigate dynamic catalyst materials and reaction environments towards the sustainable production of fuels and chemicals. She received her B.S. (2010) in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University, supported with a full ride scholarship. She earned her M.S. (2013) and Ph.D. (2015) in Chemical Engineering from Stanford Universitysupportedas an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and as a Stanford DARE Fellow. Linsey completed postdoctoral research at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology with the Institute of Photon Science and Synchrotron Radiation, supported by a Helmholtz Postdoctoral Fellowship. Linsey has been recognized as a “Pioneer of the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division” of AIChE (2021) and was honored with the ACS Catalysis Early Career Award (2024). She has also received an NSF Career Award (2022), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2025), and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2025).
Erik C. Nisbet is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Policy Analysis & Communication and the founding director of the Center for Communication & Public Policy in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. His research focuses on comparative political communication and public opinion, elections, democracy, and international security. Erik has published nearly 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in communication, political science, public health, and environmental sciences. His research has been supported by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. Department of State, and Meta.
Mark Hauser is Professor of Anthropology andDirectorWeinberg Center for Global Studies. His research combines archaeological, environmental science, and historical methods to explore how people solveproblemsnot of their own making. His approach is to compare and connect colonial contexts through everyday objects, archival representations of landscape, and built environments, focusing on how communities organize their economies and adapt to changing social, political, and environmental conditions. Topically, his work focuses on substantive economies, colonialism, slavery and empire, and the historical roots of water insecurity. Geographically, his fieldwork has centered post-agrarian contexts in the Caribbean and southern India.
