Dr. Joseph Dietrich is a political scientist specializing in race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and voting behavior, with a particular focus on Native American and other minority communities. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in Politics from Claremont Graduate University, as well as a Ph.D., MPIA, and B.A. from University of Pittsburgh. With more than twenty years of experience conducting survey and interview research, his work centers on political engagement and voter disenfranchisement. He is conducting several studies on voting efficacy among minority populations including one where he is co-developing a voting efficacy score and another on the efficacy of voting by mail in increasing minority voter turnout.

Dr. Dietrich has published extensively on voting rights, structural racism, felony disenfranchisement, and mail access in Native communities, with recent articles appearing in Social Science Quarterly, Studies in American Political Development, and other leading journals. His collaborative work also includes contributions to election administration research through the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. He has received multiple grants supporting research on voting equity and Indigenous politics and is an active member of major professional associations, including the American Political Science Association.

Dr. Jean Reith Schroedel is Professor Emerita of Political Science and former Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy at Claremont Graduate University. She earned her B.A. in political science from the University of Washington in 1981 and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, and previously served as an assistant professor at Yale University. At CGU, she held numerous leadership roles, including director of the Applied Women’s Studies Program, department chair, and dean of the School of Politics & Economics. Her research interests span Native American voting rights, American political development, women and politics, religion and politics, and congressional policymaking, and she has a strong record of collaborative scholarship with graduate students.

Dr. Schroedel is widely recognized for her influential books, including Is the Fetus a Person? A Comparison of Policies Across the Fifty States (2000), which earned the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Prize, as well as Congress, the President, and Policymaking: A Historical Analysis (1994) and Alone in a Crowd (1985). In recent years, she has focused extensively on Native American voting rights and the impact of the Voting Rights Act, publishing numerous co-authored articles on voter access, mail-in voting, felony disenfranchisement, and political trust in Native communities. Her scholarship has been supported by major foundations and has influenced both public debate and litigation, including serving as an expert witness in key voting rights cases.

Dr. Melissa Rogers is a professor of political science in the Division of Politics & Economics at Claremont Graduate University and co-director of the Inequality and Policy Research Center. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from the University of California, San Diego and her B.A. from Brown University. Her research spans comparative politics, political economy, political geography, Latin American politics, and Native American politics, with a central focus on economic inequality and voting rights.

Dr. Rogers studies the political economy of inequality, particularly the territorial distribution of resources and its effects on policymaking, state-building, and fiscal development. Much of her recent work examines inequalities in voting access for Native Americans and the institutional roots of spatial inequality. She is the author of Geography, Capacity, and Inequality I: Spatial Inequality (2022) and has a forthcoming companion volume on redistribution, in addition to a developing manuscript on the political economy of Native American voting rights. Her scholarship appears in leading journals such as the Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Regional Studies, and Studies in American Political Development, and includes extensive collaborative research on voter equity, decentralization, and geographic measurement in political science.

Dr. Tessa Provins is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Prior to joining Arizona, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh from 2018 to 2024. She earned her M.A. (2016) and Ph.D. (2018) in Political Science from the University of California, Merced and received her B.A. in Economics from Stanford University in 2013.

Dr. Provins's research focuses on American legislative institutions and Indigenous institutions and policy. In her work on American institutions, she examines how the design of legislative bodies shapes outcomes for groups divided by race, gender, and party affiliation. Her research on Indigenous institutions analyzes the structure of Native American tribal governments and their effects on intra-tribal, inter-tribal, and government relationships, as well as policy outcomes. While she conducts tribal case studies, much of her work on Indigenous politics takes a pan-tribal approach. Her scholarship has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Public Policy, Political Research Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly.