Team directory

Theophile Penigaud de Mourgues , Postdoctoral Associate

Theophile Penigaud de Mourgues is a Postdoctoral Associate with the Democratic Innovations program at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, where he also led a multidisciplinary junior laboratory studying the mutations in democratic practices and theories (2018-2022).

Danielle Petrafesa, Financial Assistant

Address: 77 Prospect Street
Phone: 203-432-9736
Email: danielle.petrafesa@yale.edu;

Sovy Phan, ISPS Director's Fellow 2024

Sovy Pham is a sophomore from Atlanta, Georgia majoring in American Studies and Urban Studies. Her primary policy interests include land-use reform, zoning equity, and socio-spatial relations in urbanity. She is also interested in critical cartography and questions of
territory/sovereignty. On campus, she serves on the Yale College Council, plays Saybrook intramural sports, and directs the FOCUS on New Haven program.

Benjamin Polak, William C Brainard Professor of Economics; Professor of Management

Professor Polak is an expert on decision theory, game theory, and economic history. His work explores economic agents whose goals are richer than those captured in traditional models. His work on game theory ranges from foundational theoretical work on common knowledge, to applied topics in corporate finance and law and economics. Most recently, he has made contributions to the theory of repeated games with asymmetric information. Other research interests include economic inequality and individuals’ responses to uncertainty.

Isabel Prioleau, Dahl Scholar, 2023-2024

Isabel Prioleau is a junior in Davenport College pursuing a Political Science major and a certificate in French. Her research focuses on comparative European politics, and especially on understanding how contemporary threats to democracy shape and are shaped by dynamics of party competition, welfare state development, and European integration. As a Dahl Scholar, Isabel is working under the guidance of Professor Isabela Mares to situate democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland within the context of social policy reform and nonprogrammatic electoral competition.

Alison Renna, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Alison Renna is a PhD candidate in Religion and Modernity and the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. As an ISPS Fellow, Renna is researching the effect of the reception of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1904 decision Jacobson v. Massachusetts on the preamble’s status in constitutional law. Through this ISPS fellowship, Renna is researching the consequence of returning the preamble to constitutional interpretation, with a focus on how returning “ourselves and our posterity” as equal stakeholders in US law would re-shape environmental law in the United States.

Kate Reynolds, ISPS Director's Fellow 2024

Kate Reynolds is a junior in Branford College studying History. She is interested in the intersection between public education, electoral politics, and the law. At Yale, Kate previously served as the Print Managing Editor of The Politic and the Communications Director for the Yale College Democrats. She’s passionate about improving the efficiency of local government — particularly within her hometown of New York City, where she spent last summer as an education policy intern at a city agency. In the future, she hopes to work in journalism or public policy.

Jennifer Richeson, Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology

Jennifer Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology and a faculty fellow with ISPS. Her research examines multiple psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity. For instance, she examines how people experience racial and other forms of societal diversity, be it efforts to navigate one-on-one interracial interactions or the political consequences of the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the United States.

August Rios, ISPS Director's Fellow 2024

August Rios is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College majoring in sociology, with a broad fascination for cities. As a low-income student from a large family of eight, he is particularly interested in identifying policy solutions to the affordable housing crisis. August is currently serving as a data and legislative affairs intern at the City of New Haven Fair Rent Commission, a data collector at the United Way of Connecticut, and a YULAA project lead at Statewide Legal Services.

Emily Ritchie, ISPS Graduate Policy Fellow 2024

Emily Ritchie is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology. Her research focuses on the psychology behind attitude change, aiming to understand when and how we can change people’s attitudes toward individuals, groups, and policies. In her dissertation, she shows how spacing out new information (v.s. consuming it all at once) can more effectively change both implicit and explicit attitudes, hoping to inform the design of public interventions, such as anti-bias efforts and health campaigns.