Claire L. Adida

Claire Adida is Senior Fellow at FSI (CDDRL), Professor (by courtesy) of Political Science, and faculty co-director at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University. She is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) group, and the Policy Design and Evaluation Lab (PDEL). She is an invited researcher with J-PAL’s Humanitarian Protection and Displaced Livelihoods Initiatives and an international advisory board member with CFREF’s Bridging Divides research program.

Adida uses quantitative and field methods to investigate how countries manage new and existing forms of diversity, what exacerbates or alleviates outgroup prejudice and discrimination, and how vulnerable groups navigate discriminatory environments. She has published two books on immigrant integration and exclusion: Immigrant exclusion and insecurity in Africa; Coethnic strangers (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Why Muslim integration fails in Christian-heritage societies (with David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort, Harvard University Press, 2016). Her articles are published in the American Political Science Review, Science Advances, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Population Economics, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Political Science Research & Methods, among others.

Prior to joining Stanford, she was Assistant Professor (2010–2016), Associate Professor (2016–2022), and Professor (2022–2025) of Political Science at UC San Diego, where she also served as the co-Director and Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (2018–2024). In 2021–2022, she served as Research Advisor to the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the U.S. Government’s Department of Health & Human Services. She received her PhD in political science from Stanford University in 2010, her Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (2003), and her Bachelor’s in political science and communication studies from Northwestern University (2000).

2025- 2026 Academic Year | Senior Faculty Research Grant

Assessing the Long-Term Impacts of Women’s and Men’s Advocacy Trainings on Livelihoods and Gender Equality in Rural Nigeria

This study evaluates the long-term effects of a women's advocacy training and a men’s allyship training designed to improve women’s livelihoods and promote gender equality. A 2023 pre-registered RCT randomly assigning 450 villages in southwestern Nigeria to one of three study arms - women’s trainings only, women’s and men’s trainings, or control - found short-term effects of women's training on women’s livelihoods and empowerment, but no additional effects of men's training. This study assesses long-term impacts of the intervention, a key imperative for practitioners seeking to scale-up programming, and investigates the promise and limitations of male allyship for women's empowerment.