Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Guinevere Nell is a research programmer at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis, focusing on the impact of economic policies on American entrepreneurship.

For example, take visas and foreign workers. Nell has found that current restrictions on American firms hiring highly-skilled foreign workers through the H-1B visa program are hurting the U.S. economy.

"Raising the H-1B cap will also increase tax revenue substantially," she wrote with co-author James Sherk in an April 2008 research paper. "Congress should be extremely reluctant to raise taxes, especially during a time of economic weakness."

Nell has also developed agent-based computer models of the economy, which are used to solve complex policy simulation problems.  She has presented her findings twice for the Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents (ESHIA) conference, once at George Mason University in 2007 and again in Warsaw, Poland, in June 2008.

Before joining Heritage in September 2007, Nell worked as a software developer and Web programmer for eight years. She also was a policy analyst at the Rio Grande Foundation, a New Mexico think tank.

She attended the University of New Mexico, majoring in biochemistry with a minor in economics. Born in Maine and raised in New York City, Nell lives in Alexandria, Va.