MESA People

Stephen has been a Research Assistant with the MESA Project since 2008 and divides his time between the University of Ottawa and Statistics Canada. An example of following an alternative postsecondary pathway, Stephen studied Computer Science, Library Technology and History before completing his undergraduate training in Economics at Lake head University. Stephen was awarded the Academic Gold Medal upon the completion of his Master's degree in Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Viorela Diaconu joined the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) project in June 2008 after graduating with her Masters degree in economics from the University of Montreal. During her schooling years she participated in a number of research projects related to education and labour markets. She is presently working on various MESA projects focused on access to post-secondary education and the pathways students take after entering PSE.

Mr. Finnie was educated at Queen's University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, after previously holding positions at Queen's, Carleton and Laval Universities Dr. Finnie has also been a Visiting Fellow at Statistics Canada since 1992. His interests pertaining to post-secondary education include access and barriers to PSE, persistence and pathways to completion, student financial aid and the financing of PSE, immigrant participation in PSE, the measurement and enhancement of quality, and other topics. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also the project's research director.

Miriam Kramer is the founding Director of the Canadian Education Project, an independent company committed to access and quality at all levels of the education spectrum for all types of students in Canada. She is the company’s lead qualitative researcher, conducting focus groups and interviews across the country as well as spearheading the development of mixed methods for research and managing projects for a number of different clients, including governments and post-secondary institutions. Miriam has been a lead researcher on the MESA project, conducting focus groups with low-income students across Canada and analyzing the administrative data files for each province. Miriam earned a Masters from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. from the City University of New York (CUNY).

Senning is MESA's web designer, working as Puppy Dog Tales. A graduate of the University of Toronto's Environmental Studies and Urban Studies program, he got involved in the student environment community. With his comfort with computers, he found an open niche. He currently lives on the internet with countless cats and dogs.

Ms. Motte joined the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation in 2006 as a policy and research officer. Among other research projects, she is responsible for the Millennium access bursary evaluation (the MESA project), Canada's largest evaluation of an ongoing student financial aid program. She also co-authored the latest edition of the Foundation's flagship publication, The Price of Knowledge. She is a graduate of economics from McGill and Université du Québec à Montréal with a keen interest in education and labour market issues.

Mr. Sweetman is the director of the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University, where he holds the Stauffer-Dunning Chair in policy studies. Additionally, he has appointments in Queen's Department of Economics and the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology. He has a Ph.D. in economics, and much of his research addresses empirical issues related to education and the labour market. Recent volumes distributed by McGill-Queen's University Press that he has co-edited include: Towards Evidence-Based Policy for Canadian Education/Vers des politiques canadiennes d'éducation fondées sur la recherche; and Fulfilling Potential, Creating Success: Perspectives on Human Capital Development. He also works on a range of other topics including immigration, social and health policy. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also the chair of the research advisory committee.

Alex Usher is the founding president of the Higher Education Strategy Associates. A graduate of McGill University and Carleton University, with an academic background in history, economics, and political science, he is the author of many articles and monographs on higher education, including The Price of Knowledge and The Price of Knowledge 2004, which are well-known as broad summaries of access and student finance in Canada. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also responsible for the overall management of the project.

Andrew graduated with honours in Economics and Political Science from Dalhousie University where he was awarded a Maxwell Memorial Scholarship for performance in economics. Andrew continued his studies at The University of Ottawa and developed keen interest in issues pertaining to labour, education, health and low-income. Shortly after completing his Master's degree in Economics, Andrew became a Research Assistant with the MESA Project in 2009.

Dr. Adamuti-Trache obtained a doctoral degree in theoretical physics from the University of Bucharest (Romania), where she taught physics for 15 years. She also received an M.A. in higher education from the University of British Columbia and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in educational studies. She has expertise in life course research, which explores the impact of gender, age, social class, and immigrant status on education and work transitions. Her current research focuses on the socio-economic integration of recent immigrants and further education and labour market outcomes of university graduates. She continues to do research in math and science education, gender, and science-related careers. Currently, she is research manager with Edudata Canada, and statistical consultant in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia.

Dr. Andres is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is also the principal investigator of the Paths on Life's Way Project, a 15 year longitudinal study of B.C. young adults. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of education, foundations of higher education, issues of inequality and access, the transition from high school to post-secondary education and to work, life course research, and quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her research focuses on the intersecting domains of participation in post-secondary education, equality of educational opportunity, and the relationship between institutional structures and individuals as agents.

Dr. Bussiere is chief of post-secondary education research in the National Learning Policy Research Group (NLPRG) of the Learning Policy Directorate in Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC). His current responsibilities include the development of research evidence for policies related to post-secondary education in Canada as well as the management of many surveys – including YITS and PISA – in collaboration with Statistics Canada and other organizations such as the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). He is a graduate of Sherbrooke University, where he specialized in education and labour economics.

Dr. Christofides joined the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph in 1972 and served as chair of the department from 1987 to 1997; since 2004, he has been professor emeritus. He is currently professor of economics and dean of the Faculty of Economics and Management at the University of Cyprus. He received a B.A. in economics from the University of Essex (1968), an M.A. from the University of Essex (1969), and a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia (1973). His teaching and research interests are in labour economics, econometrics, and macroeconomics. He is a research associate of CLLRNet and CESifo and a research fellow at IZA.

Dr. Day is currently an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Ottawa. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of British Columbia. Her research has involved applied econometric work on a variety of Canadian issues, including inter-provincial labour mobility, volunteerism, regional disparities, the relationship between pollution and economic growth, and most recently, post-secondary education in Canada. KLARKA ZEMAN has been an analyst at the Centre for Education Statistics of Statistics Canada for the past four years. She holds a bachelor's degree in economics and political science and a master's degree in political science. Her past work has mainly focused on youth transitions from education to the labour market and on youth post-secondary participation. Her current research interests include returns to post-secondary education and youth delinquency.

Dr. Drewes is a Professor of Economics at Trent University where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. from Queen's University at Kingston. He has published research in the areas of labour economics and the economics of higher education in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Canadian Public Policy, and Research in Higher Education. He has also served as a consultant to Human Resources and Social Development Canada, Industry Canada, the Department of Finance, the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board, and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

Dr. Frenette is a research economist with the Business and Labour Market Analysis Division at Statistics Canada. His primary areas of interest include the economics of education and income inequality. He has published research papers on both topics in government publications as well as in several Canadian and international scientific journals. His work in education has mainly focused on post-secondary access, with particular emphasis on the role of distance to school, family background, academic achievement, and tuition fee deregulation. His current research agenda focuses on understanding the factors linked to learning.

Dr. Hansen is an associate professor of economics at Concordia University. He also holds appointments as research fellow at IZA and research associate at CIRANO and CIREQ and is a member of the management committee of the McGill-Concordia QICSS satellite. His research on education, welfare use, and labour supply has been funded by SSHRC and FQRSC, and his work has been published in leading economics journals.

Dr. Hoy received his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics (1982) and is a professor in economics at the University of Guelph where he has been since 1985. His research spans a number of areas in public economics, including equity implications of postsecondary education policy, the design and regulation of insurance markets, and tax policy. He has also made contributions in the area of inequality and poverty measurement.

Dr. Johnson is professor of economics at Wilfrid Laurier University and Education Policy Scholar at the C.D. Howe Institute. He was Fulbright Visitor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008. His other educational research includes comprehensive analyses of elementary school test scores in Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. He is co-author of Macroeconomics (3rd Canadian edition) and is particularly interested in the use of spreadsheets in the teaching of intermediate macroeconomics. He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1978, his M.A. from the University of Western Ontario in 1979, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1983. Before coming to Wilfrid Laurier in 1985, he worked for two years at the Bank of Canada.

Ms. Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics department at the University of Guelph. She obtained her B.A. in economics from Nankai University, China. Her Ph.D. thesis is about subjective measurements of well-being. The first chapter compares the performance of subjective measurements (a group of self-reported life satisfactions) and objective measurements such as income and age on marriage survival analysis. The second chapter studies comparison of relative income effects on subjective well-being. These two chapters make use of the German Social Economic Panel. The final chapter, based on the study in this volume, is an extended exploration of the evolution of aspirations to post-secondary education attendance.

Dr. Lefebvre is a professor at the Department of economics attached to the School of Management at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has a Ph.D. in economics. He specializes in public economics, welfare and poverty, and demographic economics. His work include the effects of tax reform, cost-benefit analysis of public programs and policies, the effects of welfare programs on marriage and family structure, child poverty, and the use of time among Canadian families with children. His recent studies analyze the impacts of the Quebec's child care program on mother's labour supply and children development.

Dr. Lochner is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Western Ontario and Canadian Research Chair in Human Capital and Productivity. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1998, and spent the next five years as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. He also served as a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution for one year. He has been a Research Associate for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. He is currently a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States, the CIBC Centre for Human Capital at the University of Western Ontario, and the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in Italy.

Dr. Lochner's research is largely devoted to the study of human capital formation throughout the lifecycle. His work emphasizes the importance of using theory to guide empirical analysis and evidence to inform theory. Previous and current research explores the interaction between human capital and criminal behavior, financial returns to schooling, post-school human capital acquisition, the evolution of earnings inequality in the U.S., education policy in a general equilibrium environment, the interaction of early and late investments in human capital, the relationship between family income and early child outcomes as well as educational attainment, and the nature of credit constraints and government lending programs in the education market.

Prof. Martinello was educated in economics at the University of Western Ontario and the University of British Columbia and is currently professor of economics at Brock University. He has written on labour unions, wage determination, and union organizing, and has recently turned his attention to post-secondary education.

Dr. Mueller is an associate professor of economics at the University of Lethbridge. His current research interests include the various determinants of entry into post-secondary education and other related education issues. His other major research focus is on the determinants of international migration. He also dabbles in issues related to the labour market outcomes of individuals in same-sex couples and the labour market effects of Aboriginal residential school attendance. He holds degrees from the University of Calgary and the University of Texas at Austin, and has held visiting academic positions throughout the world. His work has appeared in a number of economics and Canadian studies journals and edited volumes.

Ms. Neill is an assistant professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research focuses on the post-secondary education system in Canada, and includes work on the Canada Student Loan Program, how tuition fees affect university enrolments and the enrolment effects of the tuition and education tax credits

Ms. Qui is currently a research assistant for the Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid (MESA) Project. She holds an M.A. in economics from the University of Ottawa. Her research interests include labour economics and health economics. Her current research is focused on students' access to and persistence in post-secondary education. She is the co-author with Ross Finnie of The Pattern of Persistence in Post-Secondary Education in Canada: Evidence from the YITS-B Dataset.

Dr. Stengos is a university research professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Guelph. His research interests include theoretical and applied econometrics and in particular nonparametric methods applied to the empirics of economic growth, labour economics, economics of education, applied demand analysis, and financial economics. He is the author of many scholarly articles and a forthcoming book, Human Capital and Economic Growth, from Stanford University Press.

Ms. Zhang is currently an economist with the Small Area and Administrative Data Division at Statistics Canada. Her research interests include labour economics and health economics. Her past work includes impacts of participation in primary care reform on physicians in Ontario and access to post-secondary education. Her current research focuses on income, employment, and education.

Dr. Carmichael received a B.A. (hons.) from the University of Western Ontario in 1976, where he also won the gold medal in mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1981. Since then he has been a professor of economics at Queen's University, serving as department head from 1994 to 2000. He has studied academic tenure, promotion contests, and piece rates, and has written on the Japanese labour market. More recently, he has developed models of fairness based on territoriality and has been an advocate of a graduate tax for the funding of post-secondary education.

Dr. Finnie was educated at Queen's University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, after previously holding positions at Queen's, Carleton and Laval Universities Dr. Finnie has also been a Visiting Fellow at Statistics Canada since 1992. His interests pertaining to post-secondary education include access and barriers to PSE, persistence and pathways to completion, student financial aid and the financing of PSE, immigrant participation in PSE, the measurement and enhancement of quality, and other topics. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also the project's research director.

Dr. Picot is the past Director-General of the Socio-Economic Analysis Branch of Statistics Canada. As of November, 2008, he became a research fellow at the University of Toronto as well as Statistics Canada. He also teaches at the School of Policy Studies at Queens University, and conducts research on various topics. His labour market research interests include topics such as earnings inequality, poverty, job stability, immigrant economic integration, worker displacement, job creation and destruction. He has written over 30 papers on these topics during the past decade. In addition to Statistics Canada, Garnett has held positions at The University of British Columbia, The B.C. Department of Trade and Commerce, the Federal Secretary of State, and Canadian General Electric. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Economics.

Dr. Sweetman is the director of the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University, where he holds the Stauffer-Dunning Chair in policy studies. Additionally, he has appointments in Queen's Department of Economics and the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology. He has a Ph.D. in economics, and much of his research addresses empirical issues related to education and the labour market. Recent volumes distributed by McGill-Queen's University Press that he has co-edited include: Towards Evidence-Based Policy for Canadian Education/Vers des politiques canadiennes d'éducation fondées sur la recherche; and Fulfilling Potential, Creating Success: Perspectives on Human Capital Development. He also works on a range of other topics including immigration, social and health policy. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also the chair of the research advisory committee.

Alex Usher is the founding president of the Higher Education Strategy Associates. A graduate of McGill University and Carleton University, with an academic background in history, economics, and political science, he is the author of many articles and monographs on higher education, including The Price of Knowledge and The Price of Knowledge 2004, which are well-known as broad summaries of access and student finance in Canada. One of the principals of the MESA project, he is also responsible for the overall management of the project.

Dr. Hans Vossensteyn works as the Acting Director, Senior Research Associate and Research Co-coordinator at CHEPS, the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and as a Professor at the MBA-Hochschul- und Wissenschafts management at the University of Applied Sciences Fachhochschule Osnabrück in Germany.

Since 1991 Hans has participated in research, training and consultancy projects covering a wide-array of subjects including: internationalization, higher education indicators, quantitative and qualitative international comparative analyses. His major research interest is in funding matters, including national allocation models, tuition fee policies, student financial support and the affordability of higher education. He completed his PhD on students' price-responsiveness in 2005.

Hans has worked as an external advisor on student financing policies at the Dutch Ministry of Education and represented the Netherlands in the Eurydice (European Information Network on Training and Youth) Expert Network on student financing issues. Since 2000, he is a member of the International Advisory Board of the International Comparative Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project, Co-ordinated by Prof. Bruce D. Johnstone at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Sponsored by the Ford Foundation. From 2005 onwards he is a member of the Advisory board of the MESA Project (Measuring the Effectiveness of Student Aid) of the Canadian Education Project Canada sponsored by the Canada Millennium Scholarships Program.

Hans is member of the editorial boards of the Dutch/Belgian journal on higher education (Tijdschrift voor Hoger Onderwijs en Management, TH@MA) and of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management.