Saharnaz Babaei-Balderlou is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. She is an applied labor economist studies how policy and technology shape learning and work.

Her work spans two connected areas (^{Google Scholar}). The first is the economics of education and teacher labor markets, where she examines how compensation structures, staffing initiatives, and workplace protections affect whether teachers stay in their schools and in the profession. This research has appeared in Teaching and Teacher Education and Policy Futures in Education. The second is economics education and the role of generative AI in the classroom. Her randomized controlled trial of a course-specific Socratic AI tutor, published in the Journal of Economic Education, provides the first experimental evidence on how AI tutoring and peer collaboration jointly affect student learning in undergraduate economics. She wrote about that study for The Conversation, and the piece was republished by Fortune and other outlets.

She is a member of the inaugural North America cohort of Google Higher Ed Faculty AI Fellows, and serves as a reviewer for Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO), Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), and other journals.

She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of South Carolina and previously taught at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse and the University of South Carolina.

 Office Hours: By Appointment Online or In-Person

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