Meet the Team

Dr. Shelly Steward is a sociologist focused on the intersection of work and technology. She is currently Chief Research Officer at The Workers Lab. She applies participatory action methods, engaging and empowering workers as researchers to study the changing nature of work, including the gig economy, automation, and AI. She is the former director of the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative and was a postdoctoral researcher with the Fairwork Project based at the Oxford Internet Institute. She has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Kinder Scholar at Rice University, and an Assessment and Evaluation Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research has been published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, the Journal of Consumer Culture, and the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and she has been quoted in major publications including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and an AB from Harvard. Prior to becoming a sociologist, she was a middle school science teacher.

Louis Hyman is a historian of work and business at Cornell University's ILR School, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City. He has published two books on the history of personal debt (Debtor Nation and Borrow) and is currently completing a history of the rise of consultants, temps, freelancers, and day laborers in our businesses (to come out with Viking in 2018). A former Fulbright scholar and McKinsey associate, Hyman received his PhD in American history from Harvard University. He teaches the MOOC "American Capitalism: A History" through EdX and is the founding editor of the Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism book series from Columbia University Press.

Yoorie Chang is the project manager for CLJE:Lab, the policy and legal innovation lab at Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy. In her role, she focuses on advancing strategies and policy interventions to enable working people to build countervailing power, and manages partnerships with stakeholders across the labor movement ecosystem. Prior to joining CLJE, Yoorie was a part of the applied research and evaluation team at the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program, where she worked on issues of job quality, worker voice, employee ownership, and racial and gender equity across a range of collaborative cross-sector projects. Previously, Yoorie has supported organizing efforts in higher education with SEIU Local 200United and served as a research fellow at the Worker Institute. Yoorie holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University.