Cathy J. Cohen is the D. Gale Johnson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She formerly served in numerous administrative positions, including chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and deputy provost for Graduate Education at the University of Chicago. Cohen is the author of two books, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (University of Chicago Press) and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford University Press).  She is also co-editor of the anthology Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader (NYU Press) with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto. Her articles have been published in numerous journals and edited volumes including the American Political Science Review, NOMOS, GLQ, Social Text, and the DuBois Review. Cohen created and oversees two major research and public-facing projects: the GenForward Survey and the Black Youth Project. She is the recipient of numerous awards, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-editor with Frederick Harris of a book series at Oxford University Press entitled “Transgressing Boundaries: Studies in Black Politics and Black Communities.”

John Brehm is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Brehm is a specialist in the study of American political behavior, with an emphasis on public opinion and political organizations. Brehm's first book, The Phantom Respondents: Opinion Surveys and Political Representation (Michigan Press, 1993), studies one of the most serious flaws in the public opinion industry, namely, the enormously high non-response rates. This book develops a psychologically based model to explain why people choose or refuse to participate in surveys, and then uses that model to examine the consequences of non-response for analysis of politics.

Ruth Bloch Rubin studies American politics, with a substantive focus on legislative institutions, political parties, and American political development. Combining archival and interview data, her current work explores how divisions within political parties drive congressional development and structure lawmaking. Challenging existing theories of party power in Congress, she highlights the role of intraparty organizations in shaping both substantive and procedural change. Bloch Rubin is also working on a project that examines Congress’s provision of health services to American Indians in the early nineteenth century. She joins the University of Chicago from Harvard University, where she was Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research. She earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.