Meet Our Team

Sanaz Mobasseri

Faculty Lead (she/hers)

Sanaz Mobasseri is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Her research investigates how organizational and social network processes shape gender and race differences amongst employees in the workplace. She does this by examining the roles of culture, cognition, and emotion in organizations using field experimental and computational research methodologies.

Sanaz completed her PhD in the Management of Organizations Department at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Prior to her PhD, she worked in finance in the U.S. and U.K. Sanaz also holds a M.P.P. from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Hannah McKinney

Project Director (she/hers)

With experience in startups and tech consulting, Hannah brings an on-the-ground lens to POP Lab’s research aims of moving the needle towards equity at work.

Hannah's social justice pursuits have focused on women’s rights, juvenile justice, death penalty reform, and international death row conditions. She has had the privilege to work on these topics at organizations including Be Girl, The Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, the ACLU’s National Prison Project, and The Advocates for Human Rights.

Hannah earned her M.P.P. from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where she studied the gender wage gap and women’s rights, and her B.A. in American Studies from Cornell University. Beyond work, Hannah is a voracious reader, podcast recommender, and houseplant connoisseur.

Dawn Graham

Data Scientist (they/them)

Dawn's background encompasses extensive work centering transformative social justice, wellness, and gender and racial equity. With experiences ranging from facilitating participatory design processes with youth media organizations across Chicago to contributing as a data engineer at a Fortune 100 company, Dawn brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to our research. They completed their MS in Computer Science at BU, a BA in Gender Studies and BFA in Art Studio from the University of Kentucky, and graduate coursework in Transformative Social Work at University of Vermont.

Our Collaborators

Elizabeth Linos, Harvard Kennedy School

Robin Ely, Harvard Business School

Ashley Martin, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Janet Xu, Stanford Graduate School of Business

William Kahn, Boston University Questrom School of Business

Charles Chu, Boston University Questrom School of Business

David Holtz, University of Berkeley Haas

Nina Roussille, MIT Economics

Ivuoma Onyeador, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

Mabel Abraham, Columbia Business School

Kinga Makovi, New York University Abu Dhabi

Alumni

  • Anusha Rahman

    Anusha Rahman (she/hers) is a graduate of Tulane University (‘21), majoring in Neuroscience and Psychology. She is pursuing her MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler.

  • Nathan Simani

    Nathan Simani is a Senior (‘21) in BU’s College of Arts & Sciences studying Psychology with a minor in Business from the Questrom School of Business.

  • Pooja Gupta

    Pooja Gupta is a Senior (‘21) in BU's Questrom School of Business concentrating in Management Information Systems.

  • Frances Smyth

    Frances Smyth is a Senior ('21) in BU's Questrom School of Business studying Marketing and Management Information Systems (MIS).

  • Caitlyn Dang

    Caitlyn graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in Statistics and a secondary in Computer Science.

  • Ananya Panchal

    Ananya Panchal is a Junior (’22) in BU’s College of Communication studying Journalism with a minor in Criminal Justice.

  • Obinna Igbokwe

    Obinna Igbokwe is a consultant working on data science, visualization and business intelligence questions in the discrimination research space with the lab. He graduated from Harvard in 2020 with a degree in Bioengineering.

  • Francesca Ely-Spence

    Francesca Ely-Spence graduated from Barnard College in 2018 and, after a brief stint in the tech sector, has enjoyed a research associate position for nearly 2 years. They hope to return to school to get their MSW next Fall.