Mike Smith
Mike Smith leads the Missouri Sovereignty Project following a career in conservation and environmental activism. He has been retired since 2017, and now brings that background in grassroots organizing to leading the project's advocacy work.
Deborah Wells
Before her academic career, Deborah Wells was active with Concerned Women for America of Missouri, an experience that first drew her toward grassroots conservative political organizing at the state level. She went on to hold a doctorate in political science, with earlier research on the geographic sorting of partisan electorates across Midwestern states. Before joining the project's permanent staff in 2017, she taught courses on American federalism at a regional university. Her research now focuses on quantifying the risk that legislative resistance movements pose to cooperative federal governance, and on mapping the urban-rural divides that drive state-level policy conflict.
Jay Harris
Jay Harris holds a law degree and a graduate certificate in 19th-century American history, with earlier research on the legal aftermath of Missouri's Civil War-era constitutional crises. A member of the project's founding cohort of student researchers in 2009, he returned as a full-time senior researcher in 2017. His work traces how historical legal doctrine and regional memory continue to shape present-day arguments for state sovereignty.
Matthew Chase
Matthew Chase practiced appellate litigation for six years, including a federal clerkship, before turning to full-time research in 2019. He holds a law degree with a focus on constitutional and administrative law. His work at the project examines the doctrinal mechanics of anti-commandeering litigation, state attorney general strategy, and the procedural tools states use to contest federal rulemaking without directly invoking nullification.
Musaed Aldrees
Musaed Aldrees holds a Ph.D. in International Relations, with prior research on autonomist and devolution movements in the Gulf and Mediterranean regions. He joined the project in 2021 to lead its comparative research line, applying frameworks drawn from Catalonia, Scotland, and South Tyrol to the American federal context. His briefs typically situate Missouri's legislative posture within a broader international pattern of sub-national resistance to central authority.
Cindy Mcgee
Cindy Mcgee trained as an economist and spent several years working within a state administrative agency before joining the project in 2022. Her research centers on state budget autonomy, federal conditional funding, and the fiscal exposure created when a state declines to comply with federal program requirements — questions she now examines from outside the agency she once worked within.
Pat Reading
Pat Reading previously served as a policy staffer for a Missouri municipal government before pursuing graduate study in urban policy. Pat joined the project's research team in 2023, bringing direct experience with the preemption disputes that define the relationship between the state legislature and its largest cities. Pat's work focuses on home rule authority, municipal ordinance conflicts, and the practical effects of state preemption on local governance.