Elizabeth Thom
Liz is a PhD Candidate in Government & Social Policy at Harvard University and a Malcolm Wiener Scholar in Poverty and Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School. She studies American politics with a focus on social policy, place-based inequality, and political economy. Her book-length dissertation explores how policy responses to extractive industry decline in Appalachia reshape local community contexts and political behavior. She has been a researcher with Harvard’s Salata Institute and the Roosevelt Project at MIT, where she has published several policy-oriented reports on community-driven, regional strategies for the energy transition. Prior to her doctoral studies, Liz was a senior project coordinator and research assistant at the Brookings Institution. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in political science and Hispanic studies. She earned her MSc in comparative social policy from the University of Oxford.
The Salata Institute
The Salata Institute supports interdisciplinary research that leads to real-world action, including high-risk/high-reward projects by researchers already working in the climate area and new endeavors that make it easier for Harvard scholars, who have not worked on climate problems, to do so. Faculty interested in the Climate Research Clusters program should note an upcoming deadline for concepts on April 1, 2024.