Three professors who joined the USC Price School of Public Policy this summer all share a passion to help shape a more equitable society through their teaching, research, and involvement with non-profit organizations. Here are brief profiles of each of them:
David Brady, Professor
It was during the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s when South Dakota teenager David Brady started to form a political conscience.
“It’s underappreciated how bad the Reagan years were for poor and disadvantaged people and really how much worse they ended up in many ways,” Brady says. “Back then, I started to understand how America was rapidly becoming an unequal place.”
Brady comes to the USC Price School after serving for nine years as professor of public policy and director of the Blum Initiative on Global and Regional Poverty at UC Riverside. While there, he also was a visiting research professor in inequality and social policy at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, one of the world’s top social science research institutions.
“I really believe in the mission of a public policy school, and USC Price is one of the world’s best.”
Professor David Brady
One of his ongoing research projects involves gleaning insights from direct interviews with 49 California and Texas state legislators to understand how decisions they make affect the poor.
“There are tons of studies looking at the choices and the behavior of poor people themselves,” Brady says, “but I wanted to understand the choices and the behavior of the people who have power over the poor people.
Brady plans to launch another story to reinvestigate long-term trends in economic inequalities between Black and white people in the U.S. to “contradict and challenge,” as he says, “the problematic assumption that it’s something about the behavior of Black people that causes this.”
“Behavior can’t really explain these trends,” says Brady, who earned an undergraduate degree in sociology with a minor in political science from the University of Minnesota and an M.A. in sociology and Ph.D. in sociology and public affairs from Indiana University.
Of USC Price, Brady says: “It’s this wonderful, terrific, globally competitive public policy school. I really believe in the mission of a public policy school, and USC Price is one of the world’s best.”
Kate Nelischer, Assistant Professor (teaching)
Kate Nelischer comes to USC Price from the University of Buffalo, where she had a similar academic position that combined real estate development and planning.
“So often, planning and architecture is divorced from real estate development in academia, which is a real shame,” she says, noting that many real estate programs are in business schools and are separate from urban planning. “Practitioners of planning and of real estate development must collaborate in the real world, so it’s very important that they understand each other.”
Nelischer is teaching a course to help real estate students help understand the design process.
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Find Out MoreShe also is teaching a capstone class on planning, policy, and development for students who are developing strategic plans for neighborhoods that will host venues at the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
“We’re trying to conceptualize the 2028 Olympics as an opportunity to make longer-term investments in these neighborhoods that will serve as a legacy,” Nelischer says. “The students are learning a lot about the Olympics and the way they’re funded, how the city and county is preparing for the Games. They’re also learning about what can be done at the neighborhood level to improve conditions.”
Nelischer has a Ph.D. in planning from the University of Toronto, where she is from. She earned an M.A. in design writing criticism from the University of the Arts London and a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
For the past two years, Nelischer has served as a director and treasurer of the L.A.-based International Women’s Resource Center, a non-profit that offers educational resources for refugee women and their families. She spent nine years on the national board of directors of YWCA Canada, the country’s largest women’s service organization and key provider of shelter and affordable housing.
Matthew Unrath, Assistant Professor
Matthew Unrath’s transformation into a numbers and policy guy began with advocacy work fresh out of Boston College, where he earned his undergraduate degree in international studies.
Unrath spent a year as a volunteer at a social services agency in Chicago supporting public housing residents. He then spent several years in Washington, D.C., addressing poverty and economic inequality at the nonprofit Wider Opportunities for Women.
“I fell in love with quantitative social sciences while I was doing this advocacy work,” says Unrath, who joins USC Price after three years at the U.S. Census Bureau, where he was an economist and branch chief for income statistics.
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Find Out MoreAt the Census Bureau, the New Jersey native worked remotely from L.A. to help produce official estimates of median income, income inequality, the poverty rate, and health insurance coverage.
“Public policy programs are incredibly valuable, he says. “Even though I was engaged in interesting and important work at the Census Bureau, this opportunity to join a policy school came along, and I’m thrilled it worked out.”
In the fall semester, Unrath taught introduction to policy analysis for mostly Master of Public Administration and Master of Public Policy graduate students. This spring, he’ll teach a course on the U.S. social safety net.
Unrath continues to work with Census Bureau colleagues on a long-term project reconciling what people report about their income on surveys versus what appears on official government records. The research aims to improve the accuracy of federally released statistics. His other research investigates how people interact with the social safety net. For example, do these programs affect how much recipients work, and is assistance efficiently targeted to households who need the most help?
Unrath’s work has been published in leading economics and policy journals and cited in major media outlets such as The New York Times. He earned his MPP and Ph.D. in public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
