AP-NORC Center Experts

Filter By:

Roy Ahn

Vice President
Public Health
Phone: (312) 759-4068

Roy Ahn, MPH, ScD, is a Principal Research Scientist in the Health Care Department at NORC. An experienced public health specialist, he has worked for 20 years at the intersection of program leadership and research in the areas of health policy, nonprofit/civil society organization management and strategy, and public health innovation. Prior to NORC, he served as the founding Associate Director of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights in the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where he designed, implemented, and evaluated health programs in nearly a dozen countries (e.g., South Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, the U.S.). Funders of this work included USAID, UK Aid, Humanity United, and others.

Ahn also served as a full-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School between 2009 and 2015, most recently as Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine. Additionally, for three years, he co-led a Harvard University course in Kenya called Innovating for Health Transformation in Africa. He holds deep expertise in the field of human rights and health, having served as a planning meeting member of the Institute of Medicine’s Multi-Sectoral Group on Child Exploitation in Tourism; the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) Office on Trafficking in Persons SOAR National Technical Working Group; and the UK government-funded Humanitarian Innovation Fund Global Advisory Board on Gender-Based Violence. He previously served as a Research Fellow at the university-wide Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard, where he authored teaching cases and teaching notes on nonprofit management and strategy, global civil society organization accountability and legitimacy, and private foundation governance.

Earlier in his career, Ahn worked on federal government-funded task order contracts as well as grants on a range of public health topics at Research Triangle Institute and the Lewin Group. He also worked for the CDC’s Business Responds to AIDS/Labor Responds to AIDS (BRTA/LRTA) program, a public/private partnership designed to increase business and labor participation in the development of workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programs. Versed in qualitative as well as mixed-methods research, he is widely published in journals, such as Health Affairs, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, BJOG, BMJ Open, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. He is also editorial board member of the Essential Clinical Global Health textbook (Wiley-Blackwell) as well as lead co-editor of the Innovating for Healthy Urbanization textbook (Springer).

Roy Ahn

Vice President
Public Health
(312) 759-4068

Roy Ahn, MPH, ScD, is a Principal Research Scientist in the Health Care Department at NORC. An experienced public health specialist, he has worked for 20 years at the intersection of program leadership and research in the areas of health policy, nonprofit/civil society organization management and strategy, and public health innovation. Prior to NORC, he served as the founding Associate Director of the Division of Global Health and Human Rights in the Massachusetts General Hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine, where he designed, implemented, and evaluated health programs in nearly a dozen countries (e.g., South Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, the U.S.). Funders of this work included USAID, UK Aid, Humanity United, and others.

Ahn also served as a full-time faculty member at Harvard Medical School between 2009 and 2015, most recently as Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine. Additionally, for three years, he co-led a Harvard University course in Kenya called Innovating for Health Transformation in Africa. He holds deep expertise in the field of human rights and health, having served as a planning meeting member of the Institute of Medicine’s Multi-Sectoral Group on Child Exploitation in Tourism; the Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF’s) Office on Trafficking in Persons SOAR National Technical Working Group; and the UK government-funded Humanitarian Innovation Fund Global Advisory Board on Gender-Based Violence. He previously served as a Research Fellow at the university-wide Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard, where he authored teaching cases and teaching notes on nonprofit management and strategy, global civil society organization accountability and legitimacy, and private foundation governance.

Earlier in his career, Ahn worked on federal government-funded task order contracts as well as grants on a range of public health topics at Research Triangle Institute and the Lewin Group. He also worked for the CDC’s Business Responds to AIDS/Labor Responds to AIDS (BRTA/LRTA) program, a public/private partnership designed to increase business and labor participation in the development of workplace HIV/AIDS policies and programs. Versed in qualitative as well as mixed-methods research, he is widely published in journals, such as Health Affairs, JAMA Pediatrics, Pediatrics, BJOG, BMJ Open, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. He is also editorial board member of the Essential Clinical Global Health textbook (Wiley-Blackwell) as well as lead co-editor of the Innovating for Healthy Urbanization textbook (Springer).

Dan Black

Senior Fellow
Economic, Labor, and Population Studies
Phone: (312) 759-4011

Dan A. Black is a Senior Fellow in NORC’s Economic, Labor, and Population Studies department and Professor and Deputy Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He currently serves as the Project Director of the NLSY program at NORC. His research focuses on labor economics and applied econometrics.

Black is on the editorial board of Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and a co-editor of Journal of Urban Economics. His papers have appeared in the top journals in economics, statistics, and demography. He has served on panels for the Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Science, and has served as a consultant for the New Zealand and Australian governments. Before joining the Harris School, he was on faculty at the University of Kentucky and Syracuse University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Australian National University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

Dan Black

Senior Fellow
Economic, Labor, and Population Studies
(312) 759-4011

Dan A. Black is a Senior Fellow in NORC’s Economic, Labor, and Population Studies department and Professor and Deputy Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He currently serves as the Project Director of the NLSY program at NORC. His research focuses on labor economics and applied econometrics.

Black is on the editorial board of Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and a co-editor of Journal of Urban Economics. His papers have appeared in the top journals in economics, statistics, and demography. He has served on panels for the Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Science, and has served as a consultant for the New Zealand and Australian governments. Before joining the Harris School, he was on faculty at the University of Kentucky and Syracuse University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Australian National University, and Carnegie Mellon University.

David Nirenberg

Dean
University of Chicago Divinity School
Phone: (773) 702-3423

Much of my work has focused on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I took a less social and more hermeneutical approach, exploring the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the historyof ideas. More recently, in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), I brought the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies (particularly those of medieval Spain), interactions between lived experiences and conceptual categories shape how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other. My most recent book, Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), focused on how thinking about Judaism shaped the ways in which Christian cultures could imagine the possibilities and limits of community and communication. I have also engaged in contemporary debates about the possibility of overcoming those limits, in essays such as “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies” and “Badiou’s Number: a Critique of Mathematics as Ontology” (the latter with Ricardo Nirenberg).

In collaboration with a mathematician (Ricardo Nirenberg), I am completing a philosophical history of the various types of sameness that underpin the claims of different forms of knowledge (from poetry and dreams, to monotheism, math, and physics), exploring both the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities. I am currently working on a series of lectures on the relationship between episodes of religious conversion and the emergence of racial discourses, and directing a new research initiative on the historical co-production of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

David Nirenberg

Dean
University of Chicago Divinity School
(773) 702-3423

Much of my work has focused on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I took a less social and more hermeneutical approach, exploring the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the historyof ideas. More recently, in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), I brought the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies (particularly those of medieval Spain), interactions between lived experiences and conceptual categories shape how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other. My most recent book, Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), focused on how thinking about Judaism shaped the ways in which Christian cultures could imagine the possibilities and limits of community and communication. I have also engaged in contemporary debates about the possibility of overcoming those limits, in essays such as “The Politics of Love and Its Enemies” and “Badiou’s Number: a Critique of Mathematics as Ontology” (the latter with Ricardo Nirenberg).

In collaboration with a mathematician (Ricardo Nirenberg), I am completing a philosophical history of the various types of sameness that underpin the claims of different forms of knowledge (from poetry and dreams, to monotheism, math, and physics), exploring both the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities. I am currently working on a series of lectures on the relationship between episodes of religious conversion and the emergence of racial discourses, and directing a new research initiative on the historical co-production of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Kevin Loker

Director of Strategic Partnerships & Research
American Press Institute

Kevin Loker serves as director of program operations and partnerships at the American Press Institute. His work focuses on two areas: facilitating research and events that strengthen API programs, and helping API collaborate with and advance the work of other organizations that want to improve journalism and its business.

At API, Kevin has served on research teams since its reinvention as an applied think tank. He’s contributed to over a dozen national studies on news audiences with the Media Insight Project, API’s joint research initiative with Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, as well as research into the ethics of philanthropic funding of journalism. He regularly assists with API’s Strategy Studies and led API efforts to study and spread practices on deep listening in news.

Events including API Thought Leader Summits are also part of his portfolio at API. Since 2013, Kevin has helped organize nearly a dozen invite-only summits on emerging challenges in journalism, such as mobile strategy and reader revenue.

Before API, Kevin worked in digital and membership services for the Online News Association. He is a former contributor to 10,000 Words, a media industry blog. Together with his wife Laura, he received a 2017 Catholic Press Association Award for an email newsletter for Catholics.

Kevin Loker

Director of Strategic Partnerships & Research
American Press Institute

Kevin Loker serves as director of program operations and partnerships at the American Press Institute. His work focuses on two areas: facilitating research and events that strengthen API programs, and helping API collaborate with and advance the work of other organizations that want to improve journalism and its business.

At API, Kevin has served on research teams since its reinvention as an applied think tank. He’s contributed to over a dozen national studies on news audiences with the Media Insight Project, API’s joint research initiative with Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, as well as research into the ethics of philanthropic funding of journalism. He regularly assists with API’s Strategy Studies and led API efforts to study and spread practices on deep listening in news.

Events including API Thought Leader Summits are also part of his portfolio at API. Since 2013, Kevin has helped organize nearly a dozen invite-only summits on emerging challenges in journalism, such as mobile strategy and reader revenue.

Before API, Kevin worked in digital and membership services for the Online News Association. He is a former contributor to 10,000 Words, a media industry blog. Together with his wife Laura, he received a 2017 Catholic Press Association Award for an email newsletter for Catholics.