Michela is Associate Professor in the Economics Department at University College London (UCL), and Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She studies how education policy can mitigate social inequalities and shares insights from her research with policymakers and practitioners. She has studied why college access policies can fail to achieve their intended objectives, how teacher reforms can curb social disparities in student achievement, and why peers matter for learning. Currently, she is studying how social identity shapes educational inequalities. She combines different methods, from evaluating real-world policies through randomized trials, to using economic modeling to simulate the impacts of policies that do not yet exist. Michela is also an award-winning teacher, having won the 2019 Provost's Education Award at UCL (awarded annually to 10 individuals out of around 8,000 teaching staff) for outstanding contributions to education.

 

Michela obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.