Karen Brandon

Karen Brandon is a Senior Communications Officer and Editor. She joined SEI in 2017. From her perch at SEI Oxford, she helps colleagues from throughout the institute find ways to better tell their research story.

A former journalist for the Chicago Tribune, Karen wrote about politics, public policy, and social trends – assignments that took her throughout the United States, and to many corners of the world, including Mexico and India. While at the Tribune, she was a member of journalistic teams that produced two Pulitzer Prize-finalist series, and she received the Overseas Press Club award for best foreign reporting.

After moving to the United Kingdom, she worked at the University of Warwick, exploring ways for economic research and expertise to transcend academia – occasionally via the unorthodox route. (An acclaimed children’s theatre production loosely based on the global financial crisis comes to mind.) As part of her work with the university, she edited a report on the economics of happiness, and, as a result, she now considers herself to be an amateur authority on what makes people happy.

In the wake of her experiences at Warwick, she founded an independent editing business that focuses on making academic economics research more accessible and impactful. As an independent editor, writer and journalist, she has helped many academic researchers from around the world find ways to express the insights from their work in ways that the rest of us can understand.

She has a master’s degree with honors from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.