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 a research assistant with the Workforce Strategies Initiative within the Aspen Institute's Economic Opportunities Program. Prior to joining EOP, Yoorie worked as an intern for SEIU and held research fellowships at the Worker Institute. At the Worker Institute, she contributed to research projects involving app-workers in the gig economy and labor relations in the arts and entertainment industry. Originally from Colorado, Yoorie holds a Bachelor of Science with honors in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, where she completed her senior thesis on precarious work in the neoliberal era.