Gemma Dipoppa is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a research affiliate with the NBER Political Economy and with EGAP.

Her research examines contemporary challenges to states' capacity, focusing on organized crime, migration, and environmental degradation. She studies the expansion of criminal organizations into strong states and its political consequences, as well as the effectiveness of policies to counter criminal governance. Dipoppa argues that such policies should address the exploitation of undocumented migrant labor, a phenomenon she has studied by identifying its drivers and evaluating interventions that help migrants escape oppressive working conditions.

Another crucial challenge states face is the management of illegal pollution and environmental degradation. Dipoppa's work focuses on the measures that states undertake to manage violations of environmental laws and the obstacles that hinder their ability to effectively target polluters.

Dipoppa's work has been published or is forthcoming in Nature, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organizations. Before joining Columbia, Dipoppa was a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a Postdoc at Stanford, and an Assistant Professor at Brown University.