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

Survey research team, Xinjiang University

Early Life:: Born in Los Angeles, Anthony's origins story is marked by early childhood challenges such as 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, Anthony 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, performing tasks like conveyor belt work and cleaning rust off car parts. As his factory and others shuttered, Anthony observed firsthand the devastating consequences of regional economic decline, manifested by urban decay, unemployment, drugs and crime. In retrospect, it's evident that the roots of Anthony's research aspirations and inspirations are deeply entrenched in his early lived experiences, which nurtured an innate intellectual curiosity about issues related to employment, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, poverty, inequality, and local economic development.

Getting into MSU: Despite these early life challenges, Anthony’s determination led him to initially enroll at a local community college before earning admission to MSU. 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, Anthony 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. His time at MSU equipped him with intellectual tools to reconcile his past and use adversity as a driving force for growth, inspiring a life-long commitment to public policy and research.

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, Anthony 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. In that capacity, Anthony designed and implemented his first survey instrument at a migrant skills-enhancement facility. The goal of the project was to understand to what extent the acquisition of new technical skills reduced employment barriers among Beijing’s informal migrant population.

For his Master’s thesis at MSU, Anthony combined several grants to conduct in-depth fieldwork in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, one of China’s most restive and difficult to access regions. Informed by a mixed-methods design, Anthony identified local contacts, trained local enumerators, and designed a statistical sampling design representative of urban service establishments in Urumqi and Kashgar, collecting nearly 2,000 surveys of Han, Hui, and Uyghur respondents. Analyzing the business survey data, his research findings were among the first to shed light on ethnic-based disparities in wages, self-employment, and mobility in the Chinese context.

UCLA and China Fulbright Experience: After being selected for UCLA Chancelor’s Prize to top PhD applicants, Anthony was admitted by UCLA into the top-ranked Geography department. Anthony received multiple nationally competitive fellowships, including being awarded a China Fulbright Award to conduct dissertation research on China’s competitiveness policy, innovation and entrepreneurship. During this period, he gained access to proprietary rich firm-level data. Harnessing his linguistic and statistical expertise, Anthony constructed measures of local industrial targeting initiatives by scraping public information from Chinese municipality websites. He integrated these measures with the firm-level data to investigate the implications of industrial policy on firm performance. In the later stage of his Fulbright, Anthony also was 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.

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.