Rachel Marie Brooks Atkins is a doctoral candidate at The New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy. As a Teaching Fellow at the New School’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Rachel gained experience lecturing in statistics. She is also a graduate of West Chester University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and has earned Master Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government and New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In both professional and academic settings, she has conducted research on a variety of topics ranging from estimating the local economic impact of higher education institutions to analyzing the extent to which federal housing programs serve economically disadvantaged households. She is currently interested in researching racial disparities in entrepreneurship rates and outcomes. Specifically, she wants to examine the role of economic shocks, human and social capital, technical assistance, training, innovation, discrimination, and public policies in explaining or addressing the disparity.
