Elizabeth L. Thom

Welcome! I am an 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 study American politics with a focus on social policy, place-based inequality, and political economy.  My current book project explores how policy responses to extractive industry decline in Appalachia reshape local community contexts and political behavior. The project is based on my dissertation, which received the American Political Science Association's Harold D. Lasswell Award for the best dissertation in the field of public policy, the award for best dissertation from the American Political Economy section, and the Harvard Government Department's Charles Sumner Prize, 

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. 

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 hold a BA in Political Science and Hispanic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MSc in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford, where I was a Thouron Scholar. Prior to graduate school, I worked with E.J. Dionne, Jr. at the Brookings Institution.

I enjoy running, cooking, watching the Premier League, and rooting for my beloved Philly sports teams (go birds). 

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