Meet the Team

Shelly is the director of the Future of Work Initiative, part of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. She is also a researcher for Fairwork, based at the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre. She focuses on improving conditions in the gig economy and developing policy solutions for a more equitable economy. Her research considers how people understand their position in the labor market and how they navigate increasing insecurity. She has studied the tech and oil and gas industries in depth, examining how people make sense of and internalize the rising risk and uncertainty of these fields. She has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Kinder Scholar at Rice University, and an Assessment and Evaluation Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Consumer Culture, and the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and she has been quoted in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB from Harvard College. Prior to becoming a sociologist, Shelly taught middle school science on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota as a Teach for America corps member.

Louis Hyman is a historian of work and business at Cornell University's ILR School, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. He has published two books on the history of personal debt (Debtor Nation and Borrow) and is currently completing a history of the rise of consultants, temps, freelancers, and day laborers in our businesses (to come out with Viking in 2018). A former Fulbright scholar and McKinsey associate, Hyman received his PhD in American history from Harvard University. He teaches the MOOC "American Capitalism: A History" through EdX and is the founding editor of the Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series from Columbia University Press.

Hilary Greenberg serves as Senior Research Associate for the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. Prior to her role at the Aspen Institute, Hilary served as a research assistant at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, focused on U.S. higher education policy, and as a legislative intern for Senator Elizabeth Warren. Hilary holds a BA in Public Policy from Duke University in Durham, NC.

Aaron is the Technical Lead for the ILR Web Team. He graduated with a degree in Comparative World Religions after spending most of his college years in the Middle East and Asia. His early career in the non-profit sector took he and his family to Rwanda, where he worked for a Rwandan NGO as a Capacity Building Advisor. He eventually transitioned into the burgeoning web development industry and spent a decade as a web consultant before his current position at the ILR School.

Yoorie Chang is a research assistant with the Workforce Strategies Initiative within the Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program. Prior to joining EOP, Yoorie worked as an intern for SEIU and held research fellowships at the Worker Institute. At the Worker Institute, she contributed to research projects involving app-workers in the gig economy and labor relations in the arts and entertainment industry. Originally from Colorado, Yoorie holds a Bachelor of Science with honors in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, where she completed her senior thesis on precarious work in the neoliberal era.