Our Team
Joel S. Yudken, Ph.D. is Principal and Founder of High Road Strategies, LLC. He is a nationally known expert on policy issues that relate to manufacturing, energy, technology, workforce and economic development. In a career spanning four decades, Dr. Yudken has held a wide range of professional positions in labor, government, academia, industry, and public interest organizations. His broad background and training in engineering, political, and socio-economic systems enables him to apply a range of qualitative and quantitative research and analytical tools to his work.
His federal government experience instilled in him a keen understanding of how the legislative process and government institutions work, critical to developing pragmatic policy solutions. As Congressional staff in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, he organized hearings, drafted legislation, served on task forces, and developed policy recommendations incorporated into legislation. Subsequently, he has analyzed and drafted legislative proposals and made presentations to Congressional members and staff on various issues, and his work has been cited in Congressional testimony.
While on staff at the AFL-CIO, he participated in a Senate Manufacturing Caucus panel chaired by U.S. Senators Hilary Clinton (D-NY) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC); a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business roundtable on manufacturing productivity; a labor delegation to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in The Hague, Netherlands; and, OECD Ministerial Conferences on electronic commerce in Ottawa, Canada and Paris, France.
Dr. Yudken has written and spoken extensively on a wide range of policy issues, including manufacturing competitiveness, climate, energy and electricity regulation, economic conversion, the Internet, workforce development, and technology R&D. This includes numerous major policy reports, the co-authoring of two books and several book chapters. His work has appeared in Issues in Science and Technology, Sustainability, Energy Policy, New Labor Forum, and World Policy Journal. Media coverage includes The New York Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, E&E ClimateWire and International Investor. He also has been an invited speaker and has presented papers at numerous conferences, forums and workshops throughout the United States and internationally, including Malaysia, India, South Africa, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Canada.
Prior professional positions:
- Sectoral Economist and Technology Policy Analyst, AFL-CIO, and Manufacturing Policy Analyst, AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council (IUC), Washington, DC.
- Senior Advisor on Modernization and Workforce Development, National Institute of Standards &Technology, Manufacturing Extension Partnership, Gaithersburg, MD
- Senior Fellow, Work &Technology Institute, Washington, DC
- Professional Staff, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Washington, DC
- AAAS Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow, Office of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Washington, DC
- Director/Principal Investigator, Project on Funding Policy in Computer Science, Association for Computing Machinery, Menlo Park, CA
- Director for Programs, Center for Economic Conversion, Mountain View, CA
- Electronics Engineer, Lockheed Missiles & Space Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
Professional activities:
- Member, National Capital Area Chapter-U.S. Association for Energy Economics
- Advisory Board, National Call To Action
- Advisory Board, Coalition for a Prosperous America
- Public Policy Advisory Committee (chair, Workforce Development Working Group), International Economic Development Council
- Member, Labor and Employment Relations Association
- Chair, Committee on Productivity, Technology and Growth, Labor Research Advisory Council, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1999-2005)
- Member, Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design, National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (1999-2004)
Academic Training:
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Project on Regional & Industrial Economics, Rutgers University
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Science Foundation Program on Science, Technology and Society
- Ph.D., Technology and Society, Stanford University
- Master of Science, Engineering-Economic Systems (Dept. of Management Science & Engineering), Stanford University
- Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Download short bio, résumé or full Curriculum Vitae (coming soon) for Joel S. Yudken, Ph.D. (pdf)
Carla A. Fleming is the Business Development & Marketing Consultant for High Road Strategies and is the Principal & Chief Mission Officer for Renewable Marketing LLC, a marketing strategy consulting firm for small businesses.
As a senior marketing management professional, Carla has developed marketing strategies and marketing campaigns for book publishing, technology solutions, government, small, medium, large businesses, and non-profit organizations. Her career experience includes working for IBM as a Senior Product Marketing Manager, Global Product Manager, Senior Marketing Manager, and Sales Representative. She was also a Marketing Manager at The Brookings Institution. Carla has served as an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University and The George Washington University where she taught marketing strategy and marketing management to MBA students.
Jim Burke is Foresight Coach and Consultant for High Road Strategies, and founder and principal of DeepDive Forseight, which helps clients exploit insights about the future. Jim has thirty+ years experience delivering foresight for government, foreign, non-profit, and Fortune 500 customers. He forecast intelligent machine technology for National Institute of Standards and Technology and planning scenarios for the Project on National Security Reform. He regularly presents to the Foresight Practitioners’ Network’s Fortune 500 company members on systems thinking, big data, and autonomous vehicles trends. As a Colonel in the Air Force (now retired) he led criminal investigations, operations, and analyses of advanced technologies and industrial base capacity. He later worked for several companies, including Northrop Grumman, the TASC Futures Group, and Coates and Jarratt, doing technical management, analysis, and forecasting. A member of the Association of Professional Futurists, Jim has a Masters of Science in Science & Technology Studies, Virginia Tech; Masters of Public Administration, University of Northern Colorado; and Bachelor of Arts, University of Detroit.
High Road Partners
When possible, High Road Strategies prefers to work as a member of a team established by its client, and/or in partnership with other consultants, experts, and organizations with complementary skills, expertise, and experience.
To-date, HRS principal partners have included:
Andrea M. Bassi, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, KnowEdge Srl (www.ke-srl.com), Geneva, Switzerland and Extraordinary Associate Professor of System Dynamics Modeling, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. Dr. Bassi has been collaborating with High Road Strategies for many years, including providing his modeling expertise in studies of climate policy impacts on energy-intensive manufacturing, and a study of climate policy implications for Ohio’s economy (co-led by Ohio University Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs and The Ohio State University).
Consortium for Energy, Economics & the Environment (CE3), Ohio University (OU) Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, Athens, Ohio (www.ohio.edu/ce3). Initially a client, CE3 and High Road Strategies have forged a working partnership to explore new areas of joint economic, energy and environmental policy research and analysis, with a focus on Ohio’s economy. Aside from participating in a joint initiative between OU and The Ohio State University on the state-sponsored study, Assuring Ohio’s Competitiveness in a Carbon-Constrained World, High Road Strategies worked with CE3 on a project to examine energy issues and opportunities for Ohio manufacturers. Principal CE3 personnel include Scott Miller, Director, of the OU Voinovich School Energy and Environment Programs & CE3; Michael Zimmer, OU Voinovich School Executive in Residence; and Elissa Welch, Project Manager, CE3.
Millennium Institute (MI), Washington, DC, has an ongoing relationship with High Road Strategies, beginning with MI’s role providing system dynamics modeling expertise for the studies of climate policy impacts on energy-intensive manufacturing. MI was also a partner in the OU-OSU Assuring Ohio’s Competitiveness in a Carbon-Constrained World, and invited High Road Strategies to participate in a project for the Economic Planning Unit of Malaysia’s Prime Minister’s Office.