Meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, School of Economics, Peking University

Survey research team, Xinjiang University

Early Life: Born in Los Angeles, Anthony’s early life was marked by poverty, homelessness, foster care, and the repercussions of parental incarceration and untimely death. After transitioning through six different households and guardians across Los Angeles, Jersey City, and Detroit, he moved to Lansing and was adopted by age 10 by his working-class relatives. Starting formal work at 14, Anthony balanced part-time jobs with school and spent summers working full-time at a GM assembly plant. As his factory and others shuttered, he observed firsthand the devastating consequences of regional economic decline — urban decay, unemployment, drugs and crime — experiences that nurtured an intellectual curiosity about employment, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, poverty, inequality, and local economic development.

Academic Studies: Despite these challenges, Anthony’s determination led him to enroll at a local community college before earning admission to Michigan State University. As a first-generation college student, he found mentorship and a supportive peer community that broadened his perspective and ignited his passion for learning and service. Transitioning from factory and janitorial jobs, he took on roles at a soup kitchen and the Refugee Development Center in Lansing. By senior year, he had raised his GPA from 2.1 to 3.5 and was hired as the lead instructor for a freshman service-learning course. Anthony went on to complete a Master’s degree in GIScience at MSU, grounding his quantitative training in spatial analysis and geographic information systems. His time at MSU equipped him with the intellectual tools to reconcile his past and use adversity as a driving force for growth, inspiring a lifelong commitment to public policy and research.

UCLA: Anthony was selected for the UCLA Chancellor’s Prize and admitted to the top-ranked Geography department, where he earned his PhD. During his doctoral training, he also completed a Master’s degree in Statistics and enrolled in the advanced quantitative training program in the Political Science department, building deep expertise in causal inference, econometrics, and computational methods through advanced graduate coursework in statistics.

Competitive Fellowships: Anthony’s language training and China fieldwork were supported by several nationally competitive fellowships, including a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship and a Critical Language Scholarship through the U.S. Department of State. These awards enabled intensive Mandarin Chinese study and sustained engagement with China’s research institutions, laying the groundwork for a decade-long program of field-based research.

China Fulbright: Anthony was awarded a China Fulbright fellowship, posted to the Lincoln Institute of Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing. During this period, he gained access to proprietary firm-level data and constructed measures of local industrial targeting initiatives by scraping public information from Chinese municipality websites, integrating these measures with firm-level data to investigate the implications of industrial policy on firm performance. He was also invited to participate in the China Household Ethnic Survey project (CHES), a significant initiative gathering international experts to collect and analyze the country’s first and only representative micro-data on China’s ethnic minority groups.

Peking University: Anthony joined the School of Economics at Peking University, China’s flagship institution, as a faculty member, eventually being promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor. His tenure at PKU catalyzed a decade-long research agenda on China’s competitiveness policy, firm innovation, productivity, and internationalization. During this period, he won multiple teaching and research awards, including from the National Science Foundation of China.

Peking University: The indelible impact of Anthony's tenure as a faculty member at Peking University catalyzed a decade-long research agenda on China's competitiveness policy, firm innovation, productivity, and internationalization. During his tenure, he won multiple teaching and research awards, including from the prestigious National Science Foundation of China. Capitalizing on PKU's proximity to Zhongguancun — often referred to as China's "Silicon Valley" — Anthony immersed himself in Beijing's tech ecosystem. Through his position at PKU, he secured co-working space in Garage Cafe, a publicly-funded incubator on Innovation Way, witnessing firsthand the transformation of the area into a policy-induced innovation hub. Anthony also served in an advisory role for a student-led start-up company, and collaborated with partners at the Ministry of Science and Technology on international projects that fostered exchanges between start-ups in Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun.

International Service: Driven in part by a desire to escape his socioeconomic and geographical constraints, Anthony developed a strong interest at MSU to contribute to global community development. Through luck and determination, he secured scholarships that allowed him to volunteer, research and live abroad, accruing unique real-world experiences that greatly enhanced his traditional academic studies. His global service projects spanned volunteering at a local economic development office in rural Ireland and multiple NGOs operating in impoverished neighborhoods in southern and central Mexico.

International Fieldwork: Anthony began his research career as an undergraduate student at MSU. He obtained a research grant to visit the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, where he designed and implemented his first survey instrument at a migrant skills-enhancement facility. For his Master's thesis, Anthony combined several grants to conduct in-depth fieldwork in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, one of China's most restive and difficult to access regions. Informed by a mixed-methods design, he identified local contacts, trained local enumerators, and designed a statistical sampling framework representative of urban service establishments in Urumqi and Kashgar, collecting nearly 2,000 surveys of Han, Hui, and Uyghur respondents. His research findings were among the first to shed light on ethnic-based disparities in wages, self-employment, and mobility in the Chinese context.

China Fulbright: Anthony was awarded a China Fulbright fellowship to conduct dissertation research on China's competitiveness policy, innovation and entrepreneurship. During this period, he gained access to proprietary firm-level data. Harnessing his linguistic and statistical expertise, he constructed measures of local industrial targeting initiatives by scraping public information from Chinese municipality websites and integrated these measures with firm-level data to investigate the implications of industrial policy on firm performance. He was also invited to participate in the China Household Ethnic Survey project (CHES), a significant initiative gathering a select group of international experts to join Chinese counterparts to collect and analyze the country's first and only representative micro-data on China's ethnic minority groups.