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Our Team

The Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines. Meet our team at SLU below.

Takako Nomi, Ph.D.

Director, Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research
[email protected]

Takako Nomi is the director of the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research and an associate professor in education policy and equity. Before joining SLU, she was a senior researcher at the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Nomi's research interests include issues related to college readiness, transitions from high school to postsecondary education and the workforce, and policies and programs supporting persistence and degree attainment overall and in STEM. Previously, she evaluated a district-wide reform of raising high school graduation requirements, its unintended consequences, short-term and long-run impacts of a ninth-grade double-dose algebra program to support struggling students, as well as the policy mechanisms to better understand effective policy implementation. Her research has been supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, Spenser Foundation, and American Educational Research Association. Her publications have appeared in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Journal of Human Resources. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, the faculty advisory board of the SLU Geospatial Institute, and the board of Gateway Global American Youth and Business Alliances, a nonprofit apprenticeship-training provider for high school and college students.

Jeffrey Cohen, Ph.D.

Research fellow

Jeffrey Cohen joined the SCAER team in an effort to guide the center’s development of real estate data and general research in the St. Louis metro area. Cohen is a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include transit-oriented development, whether the real estate wealth associated with highway construction has been distributed equitably across residents, the impact of airports and airport noise on commercial and residential property values, storms and climate change impacts on house prices, equitable approaches to property taxation, land-value estimation, housing-price spillovers across jurisdictions and the relationships between substance use treatment-provider operating costs and urban economic issues. Among about 50 peer-reviewed journal publications, he has published his research in several top journals, including Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Real Estate Economics, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review and others. He has a longstanding relationship with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, where he is a research fellow with the Fed’s Institute for Economic Equity.

Cletus Coughlin, Ph.D.

Research fellow

Cletus Coughlin joined the SCAER team after serving most recently as senior vice president and chief of staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He has been a policy associate for the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy at the University of Nottingham, England, and served on the editorial board of the Review of Regional Studies. He has held faculty positions at Drake University and the University of Georgia, adjunct faculty positions at Saint Louis University and Washington University, and visiting positions at City University, London, and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Having published numerous articles in leading journals on topics in both regional and international economics, Coughlin will propel SCAER’s development of regional economic studies.

Darrin DeChane, Ph.D.

Data scientist
[email protected]

Darrin DeChane is a data scientist at the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University. His research centers on higher education access and attainment, with a focus on understanding how academic preparation, financial aid, and educational policies influence students' pathways into and through postsecondary education. His work examines college enrollment, institutional choice, and degree completion, particularly among low-income and historically underrepresented student populations. He earned his Ph.D. in higher education from Saint Louis University.

Michael Podgursky, Ph.D.

Research fellow
[email protected]

Michael Podgursky is a research fellow and former director of the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research. Prior to coming to SLU in 2019, he spent 23 years on the faculty at the University of Missouri, where he was chair of the economics department from 1995-2005. His primary research focus is the economics of education, training and labor markets, on which he has published many scholarly academic articles and policy reports. He is on the board of editors of several academic journals, including Education Finance and Policy and Education Next, advisory boards for various statistical agencies, research institutes and education organizations, and he was a fellow of the George W. Bush Institute from 2010-2013. He is a co-investigator at the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at AIR, two national research centers funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education. In addition to IES and other government agencies, his research has been funded by numerous private foundations.

Michelle Wickman, Ph.D.

Data scientist
[email protected]

Michelle Wickman is a data scientist at the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University. Her research centers on applied microeconomics, with a focus on leveraging geospatial data and data visualization to analyze economic behavior. Her work examines housing market recovery following natural disasters, spatial patterns in consumer activity across commercial areas, and disparities in outcomes across differently represented groups. She earned her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Missouri in 2023.

Guangli Zhang, Ph.D.

Research fellow
[email protected]
View Curriculum Vitae

Guangli Zhang, Ph.D., is a data analyst at the Center for Social Development and a research fellow at the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University. His work examines how individuals respond to policy changes in their financial and labor market decisions, drawing on survey, experimental, geospatial, and text-based data. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow in finance at Saint Louis University.

Affiliated Researchers

  • Dillon Fuchsman, Urban Education Research Center at University of Missouri–Kansas City
  • Aviskar Giri, Taylor Geospatial Institute at Saint Louis University
  • Jonathan Presler, FDIC: Jonathan Presler is a senior research economist in the FDIC's Consumer Research group. Common threads in his work include spatial methods and the use of big data, such as cell phone geolocation data and large administrative datasets. Specifically, his research focuses on peer effects, economics of education, applications of high-frequency mobility data, residential location decisions and homelessness. Prior to the FDIC, Jonathan completed a post-doctoral research fellowship with SCAER at Saint Louis University after earning his Ph.D. in economics from Syracuse University.