Meet our team
Leadership
Professor Juliana Bidadanure is a political philosopher of equality working on social inequalities, intergenerational justice, ageism, relational equality, and basic income. She founded the Stanford Basic Income Lab in 2017 while an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. In Fall 2023, Bidadanure transitioned to an Associate Professorship in Philosophy at New York University and stepped down from her leadership role at BIL. She remains involved as Senior Advisor.
Bidadanure established Stanford as an academic hub for the study of the politics, philosophy, and economics of basic income. In her 6 years as Faculty Director, BIL designed several online platforms, maps, and dashboards to track basic income data and monitor the growing wave of basic income experiments; convened dozens of events with academics, practitioners, policymakers and community organizers; and published toolkits, white papers, and reports to equip practitioners with lessons-learned and best practices. Bidadanure placed ethics at the center of her vision, supporting research and learnings around basic income’s multifaceted connections with racial and gender justice, dignity, trust, equality, equity, and freedom. At NYU, she continues to write on inequalities and is involved in a range of basic income projects throughout the world. You can learn more about Professor Bidadanure here.
Former Staff and Fellows
Prior to government, Sean designed new social business models, including Reach Global, a first-of-its-kind social franchise that delivered health, livelihood and family finance education with financial services to more than two million women and adolescent girls in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He was also founding CEO of Prizma, a social enterprise in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina that grew from a small refugee assistance project to become one of the largest microfinance institutions in Central & Eastern Europe and among the 50 strongest globally. Drawing on this experience, Sean helped shape policies and practices of the microfinance field, demonstrating ways financial institutions and impact investors could balance social and financial performance. Sean holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics & Political Science.
Rebecca Hasdell served as a Research Advisor and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Basic Income Lab (Stanford University) and is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Northern Medical Program (University of British Columbia). Over more than 10 years, Rebecca has worked in program planning and strategic policy for local governments, research institutions and not-for-profit organizations in the areas of poverty reduction, food access and environmental health, including leading major social policy initiatives a City of Toronto Urban Fellow.
Rebecca’s research examines healthy public policy approaches to promote healthier communities and cities. Rebecca completed her Masters of Public Health (Health Promotion) and PhD (Social and Behavioral Health Sciences) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Her mixed-method PhD (2011-2018) integrated knowledge and approaches from policy studies and population health intervention research to examine population-level solutions to improve food access in smaller cities and rural and remote regions. Her research was funded by Canadian Institutes for Health Research fellowships in public health policy and knowledge translation.
Rebecca joined the team at the Basic Income Lab to lead a review of the global evidence base for cash-based transfer programs. Her interest in basic income is driven by her background working with communities and local government to address a wide variety of health and social inequities. Through this work, she has seen the potential for economic policy to improve community wellbeing. Her work at the Basic Income Lab provided an opportunity to better understand the outcomes of cash-based transfers, with a focus on what works, for whom and under what contextual circumstances.
Sarah Berger Gonzalez focuses on building an evidence base and scalable policy solutions to address the social disparities and inequities facing youth at-risk of experiencing homelessness and housing instability, through her work as a Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall. She previously served as Program Manager at the Stanford Basic Income Lab, where she led activities linking basic income pilots to policy. She was instrumental in building the first ever map of basic income related experiments and creating and launching the Lab’s interactive Research Visualization tool. Prior to working at the Lab, Berger Gonzalez spent more than a decade at the World Bank as a Social Protection Specialist developing integrated social protection systems to optimize the delivery of services with a human-centered approach. She also established and managed international income support programs to tackle the multi-dimensional elements of poverty through creative responses to the needs of the most disadvantaged communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and Central Asia. Preceding her work at the World Bank, Berger Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Osorno, Chile working with the Indigenous population, the Mapuche Huilliche.
Berger Gonzalez obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences at Boston College and her Master of Arts in Public Policy from Georgetown University.