Born in Los Angeles, Anthony's story is marked by early childhood challenges: poverty, homelessness, foster care, and the repercussions of parental incarceration and death. After moving through six households across Los Angeles, Jersey City, and Detroit, he was adopted at age 10 by working-class relatives in Lansing. He began formal work at 14, spending summers on the line at a GM assembly plant, cleaning rust off car parts and working conveyors, while attending school. As those factories shuttered, Anthony witnessed firsthand the consequences of regional economic decline: urban decay, unemployment, and community fracture. These experiences planted the intellectual questions that would define his career: employment, entrepreneurship, ethnicity, poverty, and local economic development.
Getting into MSU: Despite these obstacles, Anthony enrolled at a local community college before earning admission to Michigan State. As a first-generation college student, he found mentors and peers who expanded his sense of what was possible. He transitioned from factory and janitorial work to 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 lead instructor for a freshman service-learning course. MSU gave him the intellectual tools to channel adversity into purpose, and a lifelong commitment to public policy and research.
International Service: Driven partly by a desire to escape his socioeconomic constraints, Anthony developed a strong interest at MSU in global community development. He secured scholarships to volunteer and conduct research abroad, including at a local economic development office in rural Ireland and at NGOs operating in impoverished neighborhoods in southern and central Mexico.
International Fieldwork: Anthony began his research career as an undergraduate, obtaining a 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, examining how technical skill acquisition affected employment barriers among Beijing's informal migrant population. For his Master's thesis, he conducted in-depth fieldwork in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, one of China's most difficult to access regions, training local enumerators and collecting nearly 2,000 surveys of Han, Hui, and Uyghur respondents in Urumqi and Kashgar. The resulting analysis was among the first to document ethnic-based disparities in wages, self-employment, and mobility in the Chinese context.
UCLA and China Fulbright: Anthony was admitted to UCLA's top-ranked Geography department and received multiple nationally competitive fellowships, including a China Fulbright Award to conduct dissertation research on competitiveness policy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He gained access to proprietary firm-level data and constructed original measures of local industrial targeting by scraping Chinese municipality websites, integrating these with firm records to assess the impact of industrial policy on firm performance. In the later stages of his Fulbright, he was invited to join the China Household Ethnic Survey (CHES), a landmark initiative producing the country's first and only nationally representative micro-data on ethnic minority households.
Peking University: Anthony's tenure at Peking University catalyzed a decade-long research agenda on China's competitiveness policy, firm innovation, productivity, and internationalization. He won multiple teaching and research awards, including recognition from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Situated near Zhongguancun, China's Silicon Valley, he secured co-working space at Garage Cafe, a publicly funded incubator on Innovation Way, and advised a student-led startup while collaborating with the Ministry of Science and Technology on exchange programs linking Silicon Valley and Zhongguancun entrepreneurs.
Arizona State University: After nearly a decade abroad, Anthony joined Arizona State University in 2019 as an Assistant Professor in the top-ranked School of Public Affairs and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2022. He became Director of the Center on Technology, Data, and Society in 2023, and in 2026 was appointed Editor for Geographic Methods at the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. At ASU, his research has attracted external funding from the National Science Foundation, Anthropic's Economic Futures Program, and the National Research Foundation of South Korea, supporting work that spans place-based and innovation policy, experimental applications of large language models and vision-language models as policy-grade measurement instruments, and the effects of generative AI on local labor markets and workforce composition. He continues to hold strong interests in China's technological advancement, industrial policy, and long-run economic development.