Kocher’s research interests focus on the political and legal geographies of immigration enforcement, policing and the immigration court system. His ongoing work interrogates the legal rationalities and everyday practices of producing “illegalized” immigrants through the U.S. immigration court system, and he examines how the immigration courts link up with local immigration enforcement on the ground. His research also includes grassroots immigrant rights and worker rights movements that seek to push back against deportation as a tool of social and labor control.

Kocher is a co-PI on the National Immigration Lawyer Survey (NILS), in collaboration with Maya Barak (University of Michigan-Dearborn) and Kathrine Abbott (University of New Hampshire), uses a mixed-methods approach to study the field of immigration lawyering and perceptions of procedural justice.

Kocher is currently chair of the Legal Geography Specialty Group within the American Association of Geographers and is active in the Law and Society Association.

Her primary research interests include entrepreneurship and economic growth, institutions, government and organizational emergence.

Prior to joining the Whitman School, Minniti was professor and Bobby B. Lyle Chair of EntrepreneurshipĚýinĚýthe Cox School of BusinessĚýat Southern Methodist University. Minniti has previously taught at Babson College, Skidmore College and New York University, and has held visiting positions at the London Business School, the Max Planck Institute, Humboldt University, and the Copenhagen Business School.

Since 2015, Minniti is also Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Department of Management at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

Professor Gadarian specializes in American politics, political psychology, political communication, public opinion and experimental methods. Her interests lie in American politics, political psychology, political communication, public opinion, experimental methods.

Gadarian was recently named a 2021 Carnegie Fellow for her quantitative research during the pandemic. Her project, “Pandemic Politics: How COVID-19 Revealed the Depths of Partisan Polarization,” will investigate the long-term impacts of the pandemic on health behaviors and evaluations of government performance.

She is the author of Ěýand was awarded 2016 APSA Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology. The book explores how anxiety over policy issues like immigration, public health, terrorism, and climate change affects people.