Born in Los Angeles, Anthony Howell's early life was shaped by poverty, homelessness, foster care, and the effects of parental incarceration and early loss. After living across multiple households in Los Angeles, Jersey City, and Detroit, he moved to Lansing and was adopted at age 10 by working-class relatives. He began working at 14, balancing school with part-time jobs and spending summers at a GM assembly plant. As factories in the region closed, he witnessed firsthand the consequences of regional economic decline, including unemployment, neighborhood disinvestment, crime, and social instability. These early experiences helped shape his long-term interest in opportunity, inequality, local economic development, and the role of public policy.
Anthony began his higher education at a local community college before transferring to Michigan State University. As a first-generation college student navigating an unfamiliar academic world, he struggled early and finished his freshman year with a 2.1 GPA. Over time, mentors, a strong peer community, and a growing sense of purpose helped transform his trajectory. By graduation, his GPA had risen to 3.5. Alongside his studies, he worked in community-based settings including a soup kitchen and the Refugee Development Center in Lansing, experiences that deepened his commitment to public service and his interest in how institutions shape opportunity for vulnerable populations. He later completed a Master's degree in GIScience at Michigan State, where he built a strong foundation in spatial analysis and quantitative research.
Anthony went on to earn a PhD in Geography from UCLA, where he received the Chancellor's Prize, an award given to the top 1% of incoming doctoral students. During his doctoral training, he also completed a Master's degree in Statistics and advanced coursework in quantitative methods in political science, strengthening his expertise in causal inference, econometrics, and computational methods. His language study and China-based fieldwork were supported by nationally competitive fellowships, including FLAS and the U.S. Department of State's Critical Language Scholarship, which provided intensive Mandarin training and helped lay the foundation for a long-term research program on China.
International Service. As an undergraduate and graduate student, Anthony pursued various grant and scholarship opportunities to intern and volunteer abroad. These experiences included working at the Western Development Commission, an economic development council in the west of Ireland, volunteering with NGOs in low-income communities in Mexico, and conducting early research visits to China. These international engagements broadened his interest in community development, comparative policy, and the study of how institutions shape economic opportunity across different settings.
China Fieldwork. Anthony began research in China as an undergraduate at Michigan State, when he received funding to visit the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and designed his first survey at a migrant skills-training facility. For his Master's thesis, he later carried out extensive fieldwork in Xinjiang, where he developed survey instruments, trained local enumerators, and implemented a mixed-methods sampling design across urban service establishments in Urumqi and Kashgar. This project collected nearly 2,000 surveys from Han, Hui, and Uyghur respondents and contributed some of the earliest evidence on ethnic disparities in wages, self-employment, and mobility in China.
China Fulbright. Anthony later returned to China as a Fulbright Scholar to conduct dissertation research on industrial policy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. During this period, he gained access to proprietary firm-level data and developed original measures of local industrial policy by systematically collecting information from Chinese municipal sources. He also participated in the China Household Ethnic Survey project, a major collaborative effort involving Chinese and international researchers to collect and analyze nationally significant data on ethnic minority populations in China.
Peking University. From 2014 to 2019, Anthony served as Assistant and Associate Professor at Peking University. He was awarded the Early Scientist Award from China's National Natural Science Foundation (equivalent to the Early CAREER Award from the U.S. NSF) to study China's innovation, technological change, and entrepreneurship ecosystems. During this time, he expanded a research agenda on industrial policy, firm innovation, productivity, and internationalization, while building long-term collaborations across China's research universities and policy institutions. 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. He 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.