Four New Faculty Joining ILR
The ILR School will welcome four new faculty members who begin July 1.
“The new faculty will reinforce ILR’s research strength and enable the school to continue offering a broad and innovative curriculum, including expanding our course offerings into new topics in the world of work,” said Alexander Colvin, Ph.D. ’99, the Kenneth F. Kahn ’69 Dean and Martin F. Scheinman ’75, M.S. ’76, Professor of Conflict Resolution at the ILR School.
The school's Global Labor and Work Department welcomes Justine Modica and Dionne Pohler, while Claire Daviss and Merrick Osborne join the Department of Organizational Behavior.
The new faculty and their departments are:
Claire Daviss
Organizational Behavior
• Ph.D., Sociology (Stanford University)
• M.A., Sociology (Stanford University)
• B.A., Ethics, Politics and Economics (Yale University)
Daviss earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University this spring. Her research focuses on hiring inequities and how the structural elements of the hiring process moderate the influence of gender, race, and other biases in hiring decisions. Daviss explored those themes in her dissertation, “How We Hire Who We Hire: The Effect of Hiring Structures on Gender and Race Biases.”
Before her time at Stanford, she worked for several years at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C.
Justine Modica
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., History (Stanford University)
• M.A., History (Stanford University)
• B.A., History (Dartmouth College)
Modica has spent the past three years as a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow in History at Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences. She is writing a book on the history of childcare labor in America. In it, she examines how various constituencies, including nanny professionalization organizations, immigrant rights advocacy groups, federal agencies, municipal task forces, nanny and domestic worker placement agencies, and labor unions, defined the value of child care labor and, in doing so, articulated a vision of how American children should be raised and who should raise them.
Modica was a recipient of two university-wide teaching awards from Stanford University, and her advocacy was also recognized with the Graduate Feminist Scholar of the Year Award from Stanford's vice provost for graduate education, the Diversity Advocacy Committee's Excellence in Advocacy Award from Stanford's Graduate Student Council and a community impact award from the Stanford Alumni Association.
Before training as a professional historian, Modica ran a college completion program for fellow first-generation students in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Merrick Osborne
Organizational Behavior
• Ph.D., Management and Organization (University of Southern California)
• B.A., Psychology (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Osborne has spent the past two years as the inaugural Racial Equity Postdoctoral Scholar at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. His research uncovers the promises and perils that low-status employees face when expressing themselves at work. Some of his work is grounded in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion, while others focus on self-expression in general and how co-workers evaluate their colleagues’ expressions.
Osborne received a B.A. in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before earning a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in 2022.
Dionne Pohler
Global Labor and Work
• Ph.D., Huan Resources and Industrial Relations (University of Alberta)
• Bachelor of Commerce (Dalhousie University)
Pohler comes to Cornell after 15 years in faculty positions at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the University of Saskatchewan Edwards School of Business, where she was appointed as associate professor with tenure in 2021, served as head of the Human Resources and Organizational Behaviour Department since 2024, and has held the Co-operative Retailing System chair in Co-operative Governance with the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy since 2021.
Pohler’s research covers topics such as unions and labor relations, work and employment, organizational governance, labor and social policy, and cooperative development. Her current projects include exploring rural issues and the causes of the gender earnings gap in Canada.
She holds a Ph.D. in Human Resources and Industrial Relations from the University of Alberta, a Bachelor of Commerce from Dalhousie University and a Chartered Professional in Human Resources designation from CPHR Saskatchewan.