About - Our Team

Ryan Owens is Director of the Institute for Governance and Civics, Professor of Political Science, and Affiliate Faculty in the FSU College of Law. He specializes in law and courts, focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, federal appellate courts, and judicial behavior. Owens’s work has appeared in major journals such as the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics. He has received research support from the National Science Foundation and Harvard, and was the inaugural recipient of UW-Madison’s undergraduate mentoring award.

Lila Seagle is Associate Director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at FSU, bringing over 20 years of public service experience in Florida. She is recognized for her leadership in citizen engagement, public policy, urban planning, and economic development. Seagle previously served as Deputy Director of the Office of Economic Vitality in Tallahassee/Leon County and led civic experience strategy for the City of Gainesville, where she drove innovation and operational efficiency. She holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning and an MBA from the University of Florida.

Denise Mayo Harle is a clinical professor and director of the First Amendment Clinic at FSU College of Law, where she leads student advocacy and litigation on free speech, religious liberty, and press freedom issues. Her teaching and scholarship focus on constitutional law, appellate practice, and First Amendment rights. Before entering academia, Professor Harle was a partner at Shutts & Bowen LLP in Tallahassee, where she was a member of the firm’s Appellate Practice Group and Constitutional Law Practice Area. Prior to that, she served as Deputy Solicitor General in the Office of the Florida Attorney General. Professor Harle has briefed and argued high-profile cases involving significant constitutional issues and questions of statutory interpretation in both state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Eric Olson is the Economic Liberty Branch Head. He was the Mervin Bovaird Foundation Endowed Professor in Business and Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Tulsa's Collins College of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Alabama's Manderson Graduate School of Business in 2010, and before joining Tulsa he held faculty positions at West Virginia University and Pepperdine University. He has published forty peer-reviewed articles in various outlets. He served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Financial Research. His outreach work has focused on energy grid reform, permitting, and utility regulation.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the Branch Head of Educational Liberty at the Institute for Governance and Civics. A nationally recognized expert on education policy and school choice, Dr. Shuls’s research focuses on K-12 finance, teacher policy, and education reform. He has published widely in both academic journals and major national media outlets. Before joining the Institute, Dr. Shuls served as the Department Chair and Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He earned his doctorate in education policy from the University of Arkansas and is a regular speaker on the future of school choice and educational innovation.

James Strickland is Associate Professor of Political Science and leads the Constitutional Liberty branch at the Institute for Governance and Civics. His research focuses on interest groups, legislatures, and subnational politics in the U.S., with a special emphasis on lobbying and policy change. Prof. Strickland’s scholarship has appeared in top journals, and he is the author of an upcoming book on state lobbying. He is dedicated to fostering inclusive classrooms and is a first-generation college graduate.

Dr. James “Lynn” Woodworth is the head of data, analysis, and polling operations at the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. He has spent most of his career in education. Woodworth’s focus is on charter school impacts on student learning, making education data useful for public policy making, and the role of the federal statistical system. His publications include the CREDO charter school studies.

Woodworth comes to FSU from Stanford University where he was a Hoover Research Fellow. He also served a term as the U.S. Statistics Commissioner overseeing the National Center for Education Statistic. Woodworth has 11 years’ experience as a public-school classroom teacher and is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps. Woodworth holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of Arkansas where he was a Distinguished Doctoral Fellow. Additionally, he has a M.Ed. in Education Leadership and a B.A. in Music Education both from Arkansas Tech University.

Michael Driscoll is Teaching Faculty I at the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. His current research projects focus on John Locke’s views on human happiness and domestic policy, as well as twentieth-century American foreign policy. Before coming to FSU, Dr. Driscoll served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hillsdale College, where he taught several courses in American politics. Dr. Driscoll received his Ph.D. from the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale, where he earned honors for his dissertation on John Locke’s political thought.

Sam England, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Florida State University. Dr. England studies how institutional arrangements structure the strategic incentives of judicial decision-making in U.S. appellate courts. In particular, he is interested in how the dynamics of majority formation and asymmetric information influence who wins and loses in court. Dr. England's published work appears in the Journal of Theoretical Politics. He joins FSU after earning his doctorate in political science from Emory University in 2026.

Zach Goldberg is a Research Faculty member at Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics (IGC). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Georgia State University, where he specialized in American Politics and Political Research Methodology.

Before joining IGC, he worked as a policy analyst and research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, conducting data-driven research on political polarization, public perceptions of policing, education, and mental health. His methodological expertise includes survey experiments, media content analysis, and time-series modeling. At the IGC, Zach contributes to the Institute’s polling and civic engagement initiatives. His work has appeared in academic journals, policy reports, and national media outlets.

Sean C. Hadley is Teaching Faculty I at the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. His current research projects focus on the pedagogical practice of reading aloud for the formation of virtue, as well as the political underpinnings in film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s work. Before coming to FSU, Dr. Hadley worked in the classical classroom for over a decade while researching, writing, and presenting on a broad range of topics. Dr. Hadley received his Ph.D. from the Great Books Honors College at Faulkner University and completed his post-doctoral work with the University of Arkansas’s Classical Education Research Lab.

Jesse James is Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Law. He is a legal historian, lawyer, and Classicist who studies the legal cultures of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the influence of Classical forms of legal argumentation on the development of American law and legal culture. He has practiced law in New York and has held research fellowships at Harvard Law School, Columbia University's Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and the German Archaeological Institute in Munich. His first book, Laws of All the Greeks, was published in 2026 by Oxford University Press.

Sheena Kelly is Supervising Staff Attorney of the First Amendment Clinic at FSU College of Law, mentoring students through practical legal experience. She previously served as an Assistant State Attorney in Broward County and as an Assistant Attorney General of Florida, litigating complex appeals in first-degree murder cases. Kelly earned her J.D. from Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law and a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida.

Neal McCluskey is a Research Faculty member at Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics. Before joining the institute, McCluskey worked for more than twenty years at the Cato Institute, where he focused on school choice, higher education policy, federalism, education history, and social cohesion. He is the author of two books on education policy and co-author of four more, and has testified in front of Congress and other governmental bodies. He has authored numerous policy reports, book chapters, articles in academic journals, and op-eds in media outlets including the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times (online). He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University.

Phillip Pinell is Teaching Faculty I at the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University. He studies national identity, historical consciousness, and citizenship theory in the history of political thought, and has published on Iberian political thought, ancient and modern theory, and the early American republic. His research appears in journals such as Political Research Quarterly, American Political Thought, and The Political Science Reviewer. Dr. Pinell received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and serves as faculty liaison to the undergraduate fellows program.

Anna J. Egalite is a Professor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis at North Carolina State University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and has held visiting appointments at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Her research examines how targeted education reforms—such as diversifying the educator workforce and expanding school choice—can help close racial and economic achievement gaps. She has studied topics including school choice and competition, the role of family background in intergenerational economic mobility, school leadership, and strategies for diversifying the educator labor force. As Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator, she has secured over $6.5 million in research funding. Her work has been featured in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.

Dr. Adam Feldman is the creator and author of the blog Empirical SCOTUS and the Substack Legalytics. He is also the statistics editor for SCOTUSblog. He also runs the legal analytics/AI consulting business EmpiriLaw and previously taught college courses in law and political science. He has a law degree from U.C. Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and worked in litigation for several years before starting a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Southern California. Upon completion of the Ph.D. Adam pursued a postdoctoral fellowship through Columbia Law School. He has published in both law and peer reviewed journals as well as in legal press outlets including Bloomberg Law and Law.com.

Michael Hartney is the Bruni Family Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He is also a research affiliate at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and, in 2020-21, a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell Hoover National Fellow.
Hartney’s scholarly expertise is in American politics and public policy with a focus on state and local government, interest groups, and education reform. His academic research has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science and received media coverage in the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. His writing has also appeared in popular outlets such as City Journal, Education Next, National Review, the New York Post, and the Washington Post.

Morris M. Kleiner is a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research and policy focus is the role of institutions in labor markets and employment issues in enhancing productivity. His specific research agenda has been focused on the role of occupational licensing for workers and consumers in the United States and other nations. He is currently serving as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Natalie Millar is the Styslinger Family Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama. She is a specialist in labor and public economics, she researches how public subsidies influence labor market outcomes for workers and firms. Following a Cornell University postdoctoral fellowship, she will join FSU as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2027. She's going to be a Fellow at the IGC from August 26 - August 27, prior to her full-time appointment.

Alexander William Salter is the Georgie G. Snyder Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University and the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU’s Free Market Institute. He has written three books for academic presses and more than 80 scholarly articles about monetary economics, property rights, and political economy. In addition, he is the author of more than 500 commentary pieces for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Barron’s, Fortune, Newsweek, and dozens of other outlets.

Zack Smith is a Senior Legal Fellow of Courts and the Constitution at The Heritage Foundation. He previously served for several years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Florida. Prior to that, he spent two years as an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which he joined after clerking for the Hon. Emmett R. Cox on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Smith received his undergraduate, master’s, and law degrees from the University of Florida. During law school, Smith served as the Editor in Chief of the Florida Law Review and served on the executive boards of several student organizations, including the UF Chapter of the Federalist Society.

Kari Edwards is an Administrative Associate known for her strong organizational skills, attention to detail, and reliable support of leadership and cross‑functional teams. She plays an essential role in coordinating daily operations, managing administrative processes and travel coordination, and ensuring clear, efficient communication across the workplace. Kari earned her Certified Public Manager (CPM) credential from Florida State University and is recognized for her planning and problem‑solving abilities, along with a proactive, solutions‑focused approach. She is also known for her professionalism, adaptability, and ability to manage multiple priorities with confidence.

Nicholas Joly serves as Grants Administrator for the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University and brings more than a decade of experience in research administration. His expertise spans the full grants lifecycle, including funding strategy, proposal development, regulatory compliance, award management, and reporting. Throughout his career, he has partnered with faculty, researchers, and program staff to secure and manage extramural funding across federal, state, and private sources. Nicholas is skilled in coordinating complex submissions, developing competitive proposals, and fostering collaboration across operational and programmatic teams. He is committed to providing accountable, transparent, and service-oriented support for sponsored programs.

Kathy Treadway is the Event Manager at the Institute for Governance and Civics at FSU. She is a proud Florida State alumna and Tallahassee native. Kathy is passionate about creating and executing impactful events for the IGC. She is a graduate of FSU’s Dedman School of Hospitality.

Lily Cosentino is the Social Media Specialist for Florida State University's Institute for Governance & Civics, where she creates engaging digital content that highlights the Institute's programs, research, events, and impact while connecting students, faculty, alumni, and the broader community with its mission to advance civic education and leadership. She earned her bachelor's degree in Digital Media Production from Florida State University's School of Communication and is excited to use her passion for digital media to support the Institute's work.