Leah Brooks is Associate Professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University and the Director of the Center for Washington Area Studies. After receiving her PhD from UCLA in 2005, she taught at the University of Toronto and McGill University, and worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her research interest is urban political economy. She has examined Business Improvement Districts to understand the resolution of collective action problems, and the Community Development Block Grant program to analyze the political economy of grant giving at the municipal and sub-municipal levels. She has documented the existence and analyzed the impacts of municipally-imposed tax and expenditure limits, studied the premium required to assemble land, analyzed the long-term effects of streetcars on urban form, and examined the impact of containerization on cities. More recently, she has documented the extraordinary increase in the cost of US infrastructure over the last half-century and studied its causes. At present, she is chronicling the extremely long lag in development after the 1968 civil disturbance in Washington, DC and analyzing how government policy ameliorated or exacerbated this delay. She is embarking on new work using restricted Census data to explore how the location and grouping of customer-facing retail in cities has changed over the last decades, and an analysis of the role of participation in democratic governance through a text analysis of the corpus of the last century of US statutes. She has taught courses in urban economics and public economics, and current teaches intermediate microeconomics for policy students, applied econometrics course for policy PhD students, and Data visualization using R. Over the last five years, she has worked to revitalize the Center for Washington Area Studies as a hub for policy-relevant research on the Washington area. This includes an annual report that launches with a Brookings event, and an annual conference that brings urban economists in academic, government non-government organization across the DC area together for a day of research on urban economics topics.