University of Illinois at Chicago
Benjamin M. Superfine is a Professor in the College of Education at UIC, where his research interests center on education law and policy.
Superfine received his J.D. and Ph.D. in Education Foundations and Policy from the University of Michigan. Before joining UIC, Superfine practiced law at Dow Lohnes PLLC in Washington, D.C. Superfine's research focuses on the history of education law and policy, school finance reform, standards-based reform and accountability, teacher evaluation, and collective bargaining. His research is interdisciplinary and addresses educational issues through the lenses of law, history, and social science. He is the founder and Director of the Research on Urban Education Policy Initiative at UIC.
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Katherine (Kate) Zinsser is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Community and Prevention Research program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Through her research Kate strives to support the social-emotional well-being and development of young children and their caregivers by conducting applied research that can benefit practice and policy. Current projects include: developing research-based tools to foster social and emotional teaching practices including child assessments, classroom observation, and professional learning strategies; exploring the ways that high-quality teachers are able to positively affect children’s social and emotional learning; and examining how organizational and ecological characteristics of educational settings – such as state education policies, quality rating improvement systems, workplace climate, and administrator practices – affect social and emotional teaching.
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Rachel Weber is a professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she conducts research in economic development, real estate, and public finance. She has expertise in the areas of urban and regional economic development, public finance, municipal government law, planning theory, andreal estate. She has conducted extensive research on the impact of changes in capital markets on urban economies and the built environment. She has also written on school and infrastructure finance, the effect of e-commerce on bricks-and-mortar retailers, the design of incentive contracts, and participatory budgeting. She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning and author of From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Weber was appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force and was a member of the Urban Policy Advisory Committee for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
