Seven Maxwell School faculty members will have new titles in the 2024-25 academic year due to promotions approved by the Syracuse University Board of Trustees. Four of them have received tenure in their advancement from assistant to associate professor: Edwin Ackerman, Marc Garcia, Timur Hammond and Alex Rothenberg.

Ackerman, associate professor and undergraduate director in the Sociology Department, is a senior research associate for the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. He uses comparative-historical methods to understand how political identities are formed, articulated and become operative. He has studied this process in three contexts: the historical trajectory of debates over “illegal” immigration in the U.S., the relationship between political economy and political party formation in Latin America, and the rise of transnational grassroots right-wing mobilization against “gender ideology” in Latin America and the U.S. He examines two nationalist insurrections that were largely composed of a peasant-base in Mexico in 1921 and Bolivia in 1952 in his book, "Origins of the Mass Party: Dispossession and the Party-Form in Mexico and Bolivia in Comparative Perspective" (University of Oxford Press, 2021). His work has been published in Social Science History, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Language and Politics, and Contexts, and has been featured on Jacobin and National Public Radio, among other media outlets. He is a former American Sociological Association Minority Fellowship Program fellow and Ford Fellow and was a Global History Fellow at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center (2018-19). He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016.

Garcia, associate professor of sociology, is a senior research associate for the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health, a faculty associate for the Aging Studies Institute, and a research affiliate for the Center for Aging and Policy Studies. His research is organized around two interrelated themes that seek to explain health disparities in the United States: cognitive health and mortality disparities between older racial/ethnic and immigrant adults, and within-group differences in health and mortality among U.S. Latino subgroups. His research was among the first to report that, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, older Black and Latino adults experienced mortality rates that were two to three times higher than that of whites. This research was also the first to report that COVID-19 mortality diminished the longstanding mortality advantage of Latinos compared to whites. His recently published work includes “Educational Benefits and Cognitive Health Life Expectancies: Racial/Ethnic, Nativity, and Gender Disparities” in The Gerontologist and “The Color of COVID-19: Structural Racism and the Disproportionate Impact of the Pandemic on Older Black and Latinx Adults” in The Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences. Garcia received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas-Austin in 2015.

Hammond, associate professor of geography and the environment, is a senior research associate for the Middle Eastern Studies Program and a research affiliate for the South Asia Center and the Center for European Studies in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His specialties include cultural geography, urban geography, geographies of memory, Turkey and the Middle East. In his 2023 book, “Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul” (University of California Press), he argues that scholars of Islam should focus not only on what Islam is but also where it is practiced and understood. To develop this argument, Hammond follows the practices of storytelling and building projects from the last years of the Ottoman Empire until the early 2010s, providing an account of urban religion in Istanbul while offering opportunities to reconsider how the changing cultures of Islam in Turkey and beyond are understood. Other recent publications include the co-authored “Trajectories of Translation” published in the August 2023 Progress in Human Geography.  He was honored in 2022 with a Meredith Teaching Recognition Award. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016.

Rothenberg, associate professor of economics, is a senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research. His research focuses on the effects of urban transport policies on commuting outcomes in Jakarta, long-term growth and development outcomes in Indonesia’s outer islands, the impacts of rural migration programs on diversity and identity, and how transport improvements affect firm entry and employment. One of his current research projects, "Strengthening Policies on Climate Change in Asia and the Pacific through Economic Research, 2023-2025,” is sponsored by the Asian Development Bank. Prior to joining Maxwell, he served as an economist at the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. His work has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal and the Journal of Urban Economics. He was honored in 2023 with the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Teaching and Research—the highest honor the Maxwell School offers to untenured faculty. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.

Additionally, Yoonseok Lee, Daniel McDowell and Saba Siddiki have been promoted from associate to full professor.

Lee, professor and director of graduate studies in the Economics Department, is a Melvin A. Eggers Economics Faculty Scholar as well as a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. He examines econometric theory and applied econometrics. His econometric theory topics focus on semi-parametric dynamic panel data models, treatment effect in panel data, weak instrumental variables problems, and model selection in high dimensional models. His applied topics use advanced econometric models to study social interaction and segregation, firm productivity and strategic decisions, income inequality and crime, medical treatment effects, and panel data forecasting. His work has been published in numerous journals, including the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Econometric Theory, and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 2006.

McDowell, professor of political science and Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs, co-directs the Study of Global Politics speaker series in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His research focuses on international political economy, with an emphasis on the international financial and monetary systems. He is author of "Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar" (Oxford University Press, 2023) and “Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? The United States, the IMF, and the International Lender of Last Resort” (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is frequently cited by major media outlets and his work has been published in numerous journals, including International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Review of International Organizations, and the Review of International Political Economy. As a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, he contributes to analysis of international de-dollarization trends. In 2023 he testified before a U.S. Congressional subcommittee, sharing the impact of financial sanctions on the use of the dollar around the world. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2012.

Siddiki, professor of public administration and international affairs, is the Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy and director of the master of public administration program and the Center for Policy Design and Governance. She focuses on policy design, collaborative policymaking, institutional theory and analysis, and regulatory implementation and compliance. Her research has been published in leading public affairs journals, including the Policy Studies Journal, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, and Public Administration, among others. She is also the author or editor of multiple books, including “Understanding and Analyzing Public Policy Design” (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and “Institutional Grammar: Foundations and Applications for Institutional Analysis” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her research awards include a recent $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate public bus fleet electrification. Siddiki received a Ph.D. in public affairs from the University of Colorado Denver in 2011.