Provost's Office

Laurence Ales is Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Professor Ales is currently the Senior Associate Dean for Education at the Tepper School overseeing all the educational portfolio of the school. He joined CMU in 2008. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2008 and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. His research focuses on the design of tax policy and on the labor implication of technological change. Recent work has analyzed how to tax the labor income of highly paid CEOs and how taxes should be designed taking into account location of work and marital status. Looking at the impact of technology Professor Ales has  studied how different types of technologies generate different patterns of task automation. His research has been published in journals such as Econometrica, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Theory.  At the Tepper School, Professor Ales currently teaches courses for the MBA program and for Executive Education.

Welcome! I'm an Assistant Professor in the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology. My research concerns the politics of science and technology, including the regulation of emerging technologies, international technology competition, and military research and innovation. 

Welcome! I am currently an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Carnegie Mellon University. My research focuses on questions related to the spread of military technology around the world, public support for the use of force and technology, and the effectiveness of force and technology on the battlefield and more broadly in international relations. Do armed drones increase or decrease terrorism, and what explains drone proliferation? What factors impact support for the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear or chemical weapons? What effect will greater female leadership around the world have on international politics? Should countries go to war in order to bolster their reputations for resolve? These are the kinds of questions my research addresses.

My academic research has been published or is forthcoming in journals like International Organization, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and International Studies Quarterly. You can also find my policy commentary in outlets like he Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Lawfare, and War on the Rocks.

Before joining CMU I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, was a Grand Strategy Predoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Grand Strategy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Emerging Scholar. I earned a BA summa cum laude in Economics and Political Science from the George Washington University in 2016, and interned with the U.S. State Department and U.S. Senate.

Paige Zalman is a higher education scholar-practitioner, musicologist, and percussionist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She currently serves as the Associate Director of Undergraduate Research and Scholar Development at Carnegie Mellon University, where she helps connect undergraduate students to research opportunities on and off campus and advises undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni applying to competitive national and international scholarships and fellowships. In addition to her work at Carnegie Mellon, Paige also teaches music history as an Adjunct Professor at Duquesne University's Mary Pappert School of Music. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research draws upon a variety of qualitative social science, humanities, and arts-based methods to explore interests across the fields of musicology and higher education. She holds a Ph.D. in higher education and an M.A. in musicology from West Virginia University, as well as a B.M. in music performance (percussion) from the University of North Carolina Wilmington.