Gabriel Nahmias

Research Affiliate

Gabriel Nahmias is the Senior Strategy and Analytics Lead at the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Before joining the AFL-CIO, Gabriel completed a Ph.D. in political science at MIT, where he wrote his dissertation on political organizing and how individual activists decide whether to engage in recruitment work. As a comparativist, Gabriel’s research draws experiments, data, interviews, and experiences from both the US and South African contexts. His overall professional commitment is to understanding how communities can create the power necessary to achieve their vision of the good life and supporting them in this work.

As part of the MIT GOV/LAB, Gabriel has supported a field experiment in Kenya, qualitative research in South Africa, a replication of a study in the Philippines, and, most recently, a mini-guide on the concept of trust. He also wrote a white paper for the Work of the Future Taskforce on innovations in the American labor movement, identifying new seeds of collective action.

In addition to his academic research, Gabriel has remained consistently committed to engaging directly in advocacy work. Before coming to MIT, he spent two years with Equal Education, a social movement organization in South Africa targeting issues of education inequality. In addition, while at MIT, Gabriel co-founded the MIT Graduate Student Union and spent four years organizing with them until their successful election in 2022. He now supports the work of the labor movement as the lead of the AFL-CIO’s analytics team.