Meet our dedicated team who work tirelessly to improve the lives of Canadians and their families. Together, Institute staff, researchers and our growing network of Senior Fellows from around the world have helped make us the top think tank in Canada.
Robert A. Lawson
Clinical Professor in Economics and Director, Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom, Southern Methodist University
Robert A. Lawson is Clinical Professor in Economics, Jerome M. Fullinwider Centennial Chair in Economic Freedom, and Director of the
Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. He earned his B.S. in economics from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from Florida State University. A Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, he has numerous professional publications in journals such as Public Choice, Cato Journal, Journal of Labor Research, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, and the European Journal of Political Economy. Prof. Lawson has served as President of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.
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Kristina M.L. Acri, née Lybecker
Chair of the Department of Economics and Business, Colorado College
Kristina M.L. Acri, née Lybecker, Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, is an Associate Professor of Economics and Chair of
the Department of Economics and Business at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Her research focuses largely on issues related to intellectual property (IP) rights protection with a particular focus on pharmaceutical-related IP.Prof. Lybecker's recent publications include an evaluation of Canada's IP protection for pharmaceutical products based on international best practices, as well as examinations of alternatives to the existing patent system and the balance between pharmaceutical patent protection and access to essential medicines. She has testified in more than a dozen U.S. states on the economics of pharmaceutical counterfeiting and at the recent Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiations on the economics of access to medicine. Prof. Lybecker has also worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the OECD, and the World Bank on issues of innovation and international trade.She earned a B.A. from Macalester College and received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Ross McKitrick
Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute. He
is the author of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010. He has been actively studying climate change, climate policy and environmental economics since the mid-1990s. He built and published one of the first national-scale Computable General Equilibrium models for analysing the effect of carbon taxes on the Canadian economy in the 1990s. His academic publications have appeared in many top journals including the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Journal of Geophysical Research, Climate Dynamics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, The Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Public Policy, Energy Economics, Journal of Forecasting, Climatic Change, Climate Change Economics and Environmental Economics and Policy Studies. He has also written policy analyses for numerous Canadian and international think tanks. Professor McKitrick appears frequently in Canadian and international media and is a regular contributor to the Financial Post Comment page. In addition to his economics research his background in applied statistics has led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation. Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world, and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate. Professor McKitrick is widely-cited in Canada and around the world as an expert on global warming and environmental policy issues. He has been interviewed by Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, BBC, ITV, Fox News, Bloomberg, Global TV, CTV, and others. His research has been discussed in such places as Nature, Science, The Economist, the MIT Technology Review, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and in a front page article in the The Wall Street Journal (Feb 14 2005).
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Lydia Miljan
Professor of Political Science, University of Windsor
Lydia Miljan is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Windsor, and a Senior Fellow of the Fraser
Institute. She was Director of the Fraser Institute’s Alberta Policy Research Centre and from 1988 to 2001 was the Chair of the National Media Archive. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Calgary, specializing in political communication. Dr. Miljan teaches in the areas of Canadian public policy, research methodology, and politics and the media. Her main research interests include how journalist’s personal views are reflected in news content and public opinion formation. In addition to peer-reviewed papers, she is the author of three books: Public Policy in Canada, Hidden Agendas: How Journalists Influence the News, and Cross-Media Ownership and Democratic Practice in Canada. Hidden Agendas was short-listed for the Donner Prize for the best book in public policy, 2003/04.
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Matthew D. Mitchell
Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economic Freedom, Fraser Institute
Matthew D. Mitchell is a Senior Fellow in the Centre for Economic Freedom. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mitchell
was a long-serving senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he remains an affiliated senior scholar. He is also a senior research fellow at the Knee Regulatory Research Center at West Virginia University.Mitchell received his PhD and MA in economics from George Mason University and his BA in political science and BS in economics from Arizona State University. His writing and research focuses on economic freedom, public choice economics, and the economics of government favoritism.Mitchell has testified before the U.S. Congress and several state legislatures. He has advised federal, state, and local government policymakers in the United States on both fiscal and regulatory policy. His research has been featured in numerous national media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and C-SPAN.
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Bruce Pardy
Professor of Law, Queen’s University
Bruce Pardy is professor of law at Queen’s University, senior fellow with the Fraser Institute, and executive director of Rights
Probe (rightsprobe.org). A critic of legal progressivism and the discretionary managerial state, he has written on a range of subjects at the front lines of the culture war inside the law, including environmental governance, climate change, energy policy, human rights and freedoms, professional and university governance, property and tort theory, free markets, and the rule of law. He has taught at law schools in Canada, the United States and New Zealand, practiced civil litigation at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Toronto, served as adjudicator and mediator on the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal, and has published and commented widely in traditional and online media. He is one of the co-creators of the Free North Declaration, a public petition and movement to protect civil liberties in Canada from COVID-19 irrationality and overreach.
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