Lester Lusher joined the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh as an Associate Professor in 2023. He received his PhD from the University of California, Davis, in 2017, where he was trained as an applied microeconomist. His research covers a vast spectrum of topics in education, labor, public policy, and metascience, including school start times and sleep schedules, teaching assistants, remedial education, experimental interventions for student motivation, unemployment insurance, publication biases, p-hacking, and more.
Lester also currently serves as a co-editor at Economic Inquiry and is a Research Affiliate at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics and the California Education Lab. He also worked at the University of Hawaii from 2017 to 2023, and as a Visiting Professor at the University of Keio in the summer of 2022 and the summer and fall of 2023.