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About Alexandra
Alexandra Graddy-Reed is an associate professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, specializing in social science aspects of public policy, innovation, and philanthropy. She joined USC in 2015 as an assistant professor and was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2023. Graddy-Reed earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Public Policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015 and 2014, respectively, and a B.A. in Comparative Public Policy from Hendrix College in 2009. Her research focuses on how organizational structures and financial strategies, including federal R&D funding and philanthropic grantmaking, affect innovation across sectors. Key areas include the impacts on research production, graduate student productivity, biomedical R&D financing by nonprofits, gender disparities in publication and innovation evaluation, hybrid social enterprises, and indirect cost recovery in academic research. She employs micro-econometric analyses using large administrative datasets.
Graddy-Reed directs the NSF I-Corps Hub West Region since 2022 ($15,000,000 award, 2022–2026) and co-directs the MINERVA Lab with USC Viterbi School of Engineering since 2019. She has led NSF grants as PI or co-PI, such as Financing the Biomedical Research Enterprise (2019–2023, $283,700), Emerging Researchers on the Path to Innovation (2017–2021, $349,869), and others exceeding $5 million total. Awards include USC Price School Bronze Research Awards (2016, 2018–2020), Dugan Research Award for Philanthropic Impact (2017), Junior Investigator Award (2017), and APPAM-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellowship (2021). Prominent publications feature "Prioritizing Diversity? The Allocation of US Federal R&D Funding" (Science & Public Policy, 2022, with L. Lanahan), "Gender Differences in Peer Review of Innovation" (Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2022, with A. Belz et al.), "Training Across the Academy: The Impact of R&D Funding on Graduate Students" (Research Policy, 2021, with L. Lanahan and J. D’Agostino), "The Distribution of Indirect Cost Recovery in Academic Research" (Science & Public Policy, 2021, with M.P. Feldman et al.), "Getting Ahead in the Race for a Cure: How Nonprofits are Financing Biomedical R&D" (Research Policy, 2020), "The Domino Effects of Federal Research Funding" (PLoS ONE, 2016, with L. Lanahan and M.P. Feldman), and "The Effect of R&D Investment on Graduate Student Productivity: Evidence from the Life Sciences" (Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2018, with L. Lanahan and N.M.V. Ross). Her contributions shape understandings of policy levers for equitable innovation and public good provision.
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