Nela Richardson joined ADP as chief economist in 2020, where she leads economic research and is co-head of the ADP Research Institute. 

Nela regularly provides insight into the economy, real estate trends, and capital markets to policymakers and is a regular contributor to “Marketplace” on public radio. She has made appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, and frequently is quoted by Yahoo Finance, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times, and other national and local publications.

Nela serves on the foundation boards for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association for Business Economics.  She is a member of the Bureau of Economic Analysis Advisory Committee and the Conference of Business Economists.

Prior to joining ADP, she was a principal and investment strategist at Edward Jones Investments. In that role, Nela analyzed and interpreted economic trends and financial market conditions and recommended investment strategies.  

She is the former chief economist at Redfin Corp., a real estate brokerage and technology company, where she led a team of data scientists, economists, and writers to track trends in the housing market. 

Nela also served as a senior economist for Bloomberg L.P., covering housing and financial markets, and has held research positions at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, and Freddie Mac. She was an adjunct finance professor at the Carey School of Business at John Hopkins University.

Nela earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Maryland-College Park with concentrations in financial economics, international finance, and economic development. She obtained a master’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a triple major in mathematics, economics, and philosophy.

Jeff Nezaj joined the ADP Research Institute in 2017 as director of data analytics. He mines ADP’s vast repository of payroll data, which represents roughly 16 percent of the U.S. employment base, to deliver valuable insights into the labor market.

Jeff has a passion for data. With nearly 20 years of experience in data and business analytics, he has helped organizations improve their business processes and increase revenue and profitability. 

Prior to joining ADP, he held leadership positions at direct-to-consumer marketing and financial services companies. At Univision Communications, Jeff led the enterprise business unit’s analytics group, where his valuable data insights helped guide customer strategy. 

At Guthy-Renker, a direct marketing company, Jeff played a key role in customer analytics, providing insights that resulted in a better understanding of customer behavior across all direct-to-consumer products.

Earlier in his career, he held significant positions at Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., where he focused on risk management and decision sciences.

A native New Yorker, Jeff received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and a master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University.

Liv Ye Wang is a senior data scientist at ADP Research Institute, having joined the team in 2017. She manages company-wide data mining and analytics initiatives, identifying relevant data from client systems and platforms. 

Liv is the driving force behind ADP’s monthly Pay Insights report, which mines payroll data to provide a view into the wages and salaries of almost 10 million U.S. workers. She also has conducted research on remote work and the gig economy.

With master’s degrees in economics from Fordham University and CUNY Graduate Center and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Liv is now pursuing a doctorate in economics at CUNY Graduate Center.

Before joining ADP, Liv was an economics intern at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where she developed business forecasts for the aviation division. She also taught finance and macroeconomics classes at Hunter College, City College of New York, and Baruch College.

Ben Hanowell joined the ADP Research Institute in 2021. As an anthropologist and people analyst, he explores people's decisions about where, when, and how they work. He also studies corporate decision-making in workforce management, relying on data from human capital management systems, surveys, public datasets, and in-depth interviews.

Ben is as much at home writing computer code for complex statistical models as he is designing a survey, speaking one-on-one with workforce management executives, and talking to front-line workers.

Before joining ADP, Ben was a senior data scientist at Amazon.com Inc., studying one of the world's largest private workforces. He developed algorithms to measure and predict which package-delivery contractors were most willing to work.

Before joining Amazon, Ben worked at A Place for Mom, a senior-living referral service, where he analyzed pricing, demand, consumer preferences, and demographic trends in senior housing and care. 

At real estate brokerage Redfin Corp., Ben studied predictors of productivity, retention, and customer satisfaction among real estate agents.

Ben’s interdisciplinary graduate research at the University of Washington was funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, and a Fulbright Scholarship. He lives in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Deepak Sathyanarayanan is a data scientist with the ADP Research Institute, bringing his seasoned expertise to the team in 2021. He has a strong background in artificial intelligence and machine learning, statistical algorithms, natural language processing, and big data.

Deepak has a financial services background and experience at several top institutions. At PNC Financial Services Group Inc., he was a senior associate on the data warehouse team, where he helped build data pipelines and conducted analysis. He has held jobs at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where he was a data visualization analyst, and at S&P Global Ratings, where he was a junior data scientist.

He is currently working on a master's degree in quantitative finance at Rutgers University. As a member of the Air Force Reserve, he supports the military pay division.

Deepak stays current on the latest developments in math and data science and is always looking for opportunities to learn. In his spare time, he enjoys playing tennis, hiking, and swimming.

Tim Decker joined the ADP Research Institute in 2021 as a principal data scientist. He is fascinated with quantifying the world and has a knack for seeing problems through a unique lens. 

Tim enjoys communicating nuanced concepts with simple analogies and reducing complex systems into bite-sized pieces. He has a track record of solving complex problems. 

His career started at a scientific think tank, where he worked on the deterministic chaotic dynamics of extreme weather events, including hurricanes, tsunamis, and droughts. He conducted catastrophic risk analytics, aided forecasting, and constructed algorithms to better understand natural hazards.

Tim later worked at several large companies, including Starbucks Corp. and Facebook, where he collaborated with business partners and deployed data science solutions at scale. He gained experience in operations research, information retrieval, time series analysis, and natural-language processing. He has developed and deployed models utilizing numerical simulations, nonlinear optimization, and neural networks.

Before joining ADP, Tim led the metadata and search team at e-commerce company Zulily, where he re-architected its A/B experimentation platform.

Tim enjoys mentoring junior data scientists and establishing data science best practices. He has a bachelor’s degree in applied computational and mathematical sciences with a focus in economics from the University of Washington.

Sam Adieze joined the ADP Research Institute as a research assistant in 2021, bringing a rich background in machine learning, visualization, and large-scale data processing.  

Soon after joining the team, Sam built a tool to track pay by job title and industry, data that can be broken down by gender, employment type, location, and other categories.  

He is currently working on a project to identify pay revisions and their frequency to create a pay reliability score for employers.   

Before joining ADP, Sam worked extensively in the financial services industry as a banking specialist and IT analyst. As an analyst, he specialized in identifying potentially fraudulent activity in internal money transfers.  

Sam graduated from Rowan University in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in data science. 

Marie Antonello is the senior director of program management at the ADP Research Institute, where she co-authors the team’s annual People at Work report. 

Marie joined ADPRI in 2020 to manage the production of its labor market research. She collaborates with ADP’s public relations, digital marketing, and sales teams to develop and communicate the research team’s projects and strategic events.

Before joining ADPRI, Marie worked at American International Group Inc. for more than 16 years, most recently as an assistant vice president of strategic marketing and business development for the insurer’s private client division. 

At AIG, Marie led the producer management department, supporting the company’s U.S. and Canada marketing teams. Her strategic and operational skills contributed to the successful launch of several markets for business growth. Marie’s property and casualty insurance expertise helped the company execute a new quoting system to improve functionality for clients and brokers. 

She was instrumental in developing and expanding AIG’s continuing education program. In 2019, the AIG Women & Allies Employee Resource Group recognized Marie for her leadership and inspiration.

Prior to her tenure at AIG, Marie held paralegal positions at the New York City law firms Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman, and Mendes & Mount.  

Marie has a Bachelor of Science degree in legal studies from St. John’s University. She earned a project management certificate from the Technical Institute of America.

Issi Romem is an economist and a fellow at the ADP Research Institute, which he joined in 2021. He is the founder of Metropolitan InSight LLC, an economics research firm with deep expertise in housing and urban and labor economics. He also is an affiliate of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before establishing MetroSight, Issi was chief economist at Trulia, a housing portal, and senior director of housing and urban economics at real estate marketplace Zillow. He served as chief economist at construction platform BuildZoom Inc., advised the Rentonomics team at rental marketplace Apartment List, and worked as an economist at OnPoint Analytics Inc. and the Bay Area Council, a business association in San Francisco.

Issi’s research and writing on metropolitan growth patterns, construction trends, and housing have been featured in major publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and more. He regularly speaks at industry and research forums.

He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University, and holds a doctorate in economics from U.C. Berkeley, where he was advised by Nobel laureate David Card, Robert Helsley, and Enrico Moretti. He was an adjunct professor of econometrics in Berkeley’s economics department.

Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and thought leader focused on unlocking strengths, increasing performance, and pioneering the future of how people work.

Building on nearly two decades of experience as a senior researcher at Gallup Organization, he has challenged entrenched preconceptions about achievement to get to the core of what drives success for individuals, teams, and organizations. He has focused on finding the most reliable ways to measure employee talents, employee engagement, team effectiveness, leader effectiveness, and performance, and continued this mission when he founded The Marcus Buckingham Company in 2006. His research has reinforced a simple but often overlooked approach to performance: that when people spend the majority of each day on the job using their greatest talents and engaged in their favorite tasks, both they and their organizations will win. His assessments, StrengthsFinder and StandOut, have been taken over 10 million times around the world and used to help individual contributors, leaders, and teams better understand and utilize their strengths to perform at their best. His measurement tool, the Engagement Pulse, is used by companies around the world to predict employee performance and engagement with reliability and validity.

The definitive treatment of strengths in the workplace can be found in his best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman; Simon & Schuster, 1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton; The Free Press, 2001); The One Thing You Need to Know (The Free Press, 2005); Go Put Your Strengths To Work (The Free Press, 2007); The Truth About You (Thomas Nelson, 2008) Find Your Strongest Life (Thomas Nelson, 2009), StandOut (Thomas Nelson, 2011), and StandOut 2.0 (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). His book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Publishing, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that will help us change them for the better. And, his latest book, Love + Work, helps us to discover where we are at our best in work and in life.

Marcus joined the ADP Research Institute in 2017 as Head of People + Performance Research, where he has spearheaded the 2018 Global Study of Engagement, the 2020 Global Workplace Study, and the HR XPerience Score (HRXPS) study from 2021 which measures HR effectiveness to pinpoint what strategic and tactical actions the HR function can take to increase service quality in this 25-country study of over 32,000 respondents.

Mary Hayes earned a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her Master's degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was focused on Qualitative, Quantitative and Psychometrics Methodology with additional work in Survey Research Methodology. Both of Dr. Hayes' degrees focus on the psychology of people and how these people flourish through positive psychology. Since 2005, Dr. Hayes has worked closely with Marcus Buckingham in the development of the StandOut Assessment and other StandOut tools and resources, assuming the role of TMBC Senior Researcher in 2015 and Research Director, People and Performance in 2018. Prior to her time with TMBC, Dr. Hayes served as the Innovation and Impact Director for HUMANeX Ventures, Data Management Director at Creighton University School of Pharmacy and has also provided consultation services in the fields of human resource management and human performance since 2003.

Dr. Hayes' research focus has been on engagement, turnover, knowledge worker performance and teams in the work place. Dr. Hayes has partnered with Marcus Buckingham for over a decade to design and implement valid and reliable tools to help workers get more out of their work experiences. The partnership can be described as the practitioner/ scientist model where we bring the best of both worlds to make a difference for the knowledge worker – together focusing on sound research with clients to help them understand the relationships between engagement and performance, engagement and turnover, as well as other relevant issues in the world of work.

Dr. Frances Chumney is a research psychometrician and methodologist who specializes in latent variable measurement, instrument development and validation, statistical simulations, and survey research. Dr. Chumney’s expertise of psychometric and quantitative methods is extensive and includes research design, structural equation modeling, multivariate statistics, longitudinal modeling, Bayesian techniques, classical test theory, item response theory, sampling, and program evaluation. Dr. Chumney has submitted her work for peer review and presented to academic and professional audiences in more than a dozen countries across 6 continents.

Since 2003, Dr. Chumney has been active in research on latent variable measurement, instrument development, analytic techniques, and psychometric methods. As a methodologist, Dr. Chumney has provided research design, instrument development, data collection, analytics, and reporting support to researchers in myriad fields, including nursing, statistics, education, cognitive and developmental psychology, and business. She has served as Project Manager, Research Coordinator, and Methodologist on large federally-funded research projects in the field of education. Dr. Chumney served as research professor and dissertation advisor within the College of Education and the School of Nursing at the University of West Georgia.

Dr. Chumney earned a doctorate degree in Quantitative, Qualitative, and Psychometric Methods with a doctoral minor in Survey Research Methods from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She earned a master’s degree in quantitative and psychometric methods from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in behavioral and social sciences from East Tennessee State University.

Kristi joined the ADP Research Institute in April 2020 to drive the production of groundbreaking People + Performance research. She is responsible for leading various programs and initiatives and collaborates closely with cross-functional teams in doing so.

Prior to joining the Research Institute, Kristi spent 10 years as the Director of Client Success for The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), an ADP Company. At TMBC, Kristi led cross-functional teams of geographically dispersed resources to deliver technology, training and coaching solutions on time, to specification and within budget. She strategically managed the relationships of large, complex corporate clients.

Prior to joining TMBC, Kristi spent 18 years with the Hewlett-Packard Company, providing global project management for multi-million dollar client projects. During her time at Hewlett-Packard, Kristi implemented numerous improvements to the organization’s planning and processes. Responsible for the global plan of record management and customer issue management, she aligned sales and operations teams across regions to a prioritized list of initiatives and resolved complex global customer issues involving product delivery in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Her client accounts included McKinsey & Company, Chevron, Morrison & Foerster, Starbucks, and Franklin Templeton.

Kristi graduated with distinction from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln with a degree in Business Administration. She received an emphasis in International Business from studying abroad at Oxford University in Oxford, England and Senshu University in Tokyo, Japan. Kristi was a member of the Project Management Institute and certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) from 2004–2010.