Elizabeth L. Thom

Welcome! I am a College Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University with a joint appointment in the Program for Environmental Policy and Culture. I am also a Faculty Fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research. I received my PhD in Government & Social Policy from Harvard University where I was a Malcolm Wiener Scholar in Poverty and Justice at the Harvard Kennedy School.  

I study American politics with a focus on social policy, place-based inequality, and political economy.  My book project explores how policy responses to extractive industry decline in Appalachia reshape local community contexts and political behavior. 

I am also affiliated with Harvard's Salata Institute and the Roosevelt Project at  MIT, where I have published several policy-oriented reports on community-driven, regional strategies for the energy transition. 

Prior to graduate school, I worked with E.J. Dionne, Jr. at the Brookings Institution. I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Political Science and Hispanic Studies. I earned my MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, where I was a Thouron Scholar and a member of St Cross College.  

I enjoy running, cooking, playing soccer, and rooting for my beloved Philly sports teams (go birds). 

You can find my CV  here. You can reach me at: ethom@g.harvard.edu