Growing its expertise in economic policy, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator (VPA) today announced the addition of four new senior fellows: Sameera Fazili, Andrew Hammond, Kyla Scanlon, and Joel Thayer. Fazili will work on a project on supply chain crises and resilience, while Hammond will focus on antipoverty programs. Scanlon will focus on economic policy broadly, and Thayer will tackle the relationship between the First Amendment and the regulation of social media platforms.
In May 2025, VPA announced the addition of senior staff, senior fellows, and advisory committee members, further solidifying its leadership in policy areas such as AI and Technology, Competition and Regulation, Industrial Policy and Economic Security, and Public Options and Governance. These new fellows will join a team that has been making national headlines on topics including AI-driven airline ticket pricing, credit card interest rate caps, price gouging, bringing down the high cost of energy bills, and the regulation of cloud computing.
Sameera Fazili is an economic policy expert with more than 20 years of leadership experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. She serves as an advisor to philanthropies, non-profits, and companies on energy transition, supply chains, industrial policy, and inclusive economic development. She has held senior roles in government across the White House, Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve. In the Biden-Harris Administration, she was Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House’s National Economic Council. In that role, she led the administration’s work on industrial policy, technological innovation, and regional economic development, including the response to numerous supply chain crises. She serves on the boards of the Heinz Endowments and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. She is also a senior fellow at Workshop. She previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the Treasury Department, and Yale Law School.
Andrew Hammond is Professor of Law & Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where he writes and teaches in the areas of administrative law, civil procedure, and poverty law. His scholarship focuses on how agencies, courts, and legislatures respond to poor people’s claims. His articles have appeared in or are forthcoming in the California Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, as well as other publications. For his research, he won the American Constitution Society’s Richard D. Cudahy Writing Prize for Regulatory and Administrative Law and served as the Clifford Scholar-in-Residence at DePaul College of Law. Before joining the Maurer faculty, Professor Hammond taught at the University of Florida, where he won a university-wide prize for excellence in research, and the University of Chicago. Before entering academia, he practiced as a Skadden Fellow at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago. He also clerked for then-Chief Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Judge Robert M. Dow of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Kyla Scanlon is an economic commentator and creator reshaping how people understand money and markets. With more than one million followers across platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, Scanlon educates and inspires a new generation by making complex economic ideas clear, relatable, and meaningful. Through her signature mix of analysis and storytelling, Scanlon covers the pressing issues of the day—from tariffs and artificial intelligence to the value of higher education and Gen Z’s evolving role in the economy. In 2025, Scanlon was named to Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance, appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Ezra Klein Show and had a New York Times bestseller. Her debut book, In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work, is where she coined the term “vibecession,” to describe the disconnect between strong economic data and negative public sentiment.
Joel Thayer is President of the Digital Progress Institute, a Senior Fellow for AI and Emerging Technology Policy at the America First Policy Institute, and a tech and telecom attorney. He previously was an associate at Phillips Lytle. Before that, he served as Policy Counsel for ACT | The App Association, where he advised on legal and policy issues related to antitrust, telecommunications, privacy, cybersecurity, and intellectual property in Washington, DC. His experience also includes working as a legal clerk for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen.
About the VPA
The Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation (VPA) focuses on cutting-edge topics in political economy and regulation to swiftly bring research, education, and policy proposals from infancy to maturity. To learn more about our work, visit vu.edu/vpa