Michelle Hahn is the Acting Executive Director of the Tobin Center for Economic Policy, where she leads the center’s strategy, partnerships, fundraising, and operations to grow the center’s impact at Yale and in communities across the country. In this role, she works at the intersection of research and real-world impact, driving initiatives that translate rigorous social science into actionable policy solutions.
Since 2022, Michelle has served as the Tobin Center’s Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer, overseeing the strategic and operational infrastructure critical to achieving the center’s mission. She has built and led a high-performing organization, growing Tobin from a nascent startup into a dynamic team that has supported more than 150 faculty across Yale
Michelle is widely recognized as a leader in the social science impact space, with a track record of building durable bridges between academia and government. Prior to joining the Tobin Center, she was a long-standing member of the Results-Driven Government and Public Finance teams at Arnold Ventures, where she partnered with universities and state and local governments nationwide to embed cutting-edge research into the policymaking process. She founded and led a national network of state-university partnerships—commonly known as policy labs—as well as other innovative, sustainable models that have advanced tax policy reform, expanded economic mobility, and modernized the use of administrative data.
Her work has consistently focused on designing systems that enable governments to generate, test, and scale effective solutions in real time. She was recently invited to co-lead a major cross-university initiative to develop new models for how social science researchers and governments can collaborate more effectively to deliver innovative public solutions. This effort is part of a broader push to build the field of Public Solutions R&D—strengthening the infrastructure, incentives, and institutions needed for social science to meaningfully inform public problem-solving—bringing together universities including Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Notre Dame, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Kentucky.
Earlier in her career, Michelle was a member of the founding team of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors' Division of Financial Stability. There, she helped build core analytical infrastructure and contributed to key Dodd-Frank initiatives, including the development of bank capital stress tests and the designation framework for systemically important financial institutions.
Michelle holds a Master of Public Policy from Duke University and a BA in Economics from Trinity University.
