Kevin M. Esterling is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Alfred A. Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University.  Dr. Esterling's main line of research is on the use of policy research and scientific information on lobbying politics.  His book manuscript, The Political Economy of Policy Expertise: Information, Interpretation, and the "Intrinsic Advantage," shows how policy research can mobilize interest group supporters and demobilize  opponents to policy reform.  His second line of research combines organization theory and political theory to explain interest group participation in developing policy alternatives.  A third line of research explains the patterns of the exchange of information among interest groups in national policy making using social network theory.  He has published in Rationality and Society, Judicature, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics.  Esterling was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley; a visiting assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College and at Beloit College; and a research associate at the American Judicature Society.  He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1999.