---
title: "Katherine L. Milkman"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Katherine L. Milkman"
aliases: ["Katy Milkman","Katherine Milkman"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["fresh start effect","temporal landmark","behavior change / choice architecture","[[claim-fresh-start-effect-requires-subjective-new-beginning-framing]]","Hengchen Dai"]
---


Behavioral scientist (Wharton, University of Pennsylvania) and prominent
behavior-change researcher, co-author across the vault's entire Fresh Start
Effect spine: the foundational temporal-landmark papers (Dai, Milkman & Riis
2014/2015) that established the individual-level dissociation mechanism, and
their workplace extension (Beshears, Dai, Milkman & Benartzi 2021) that ran the
effect through employers while keeping the unit of analysis on the individual
employee. She and Hengchen Dai are the two names recurring across both the
individual-level founding and the organizational-context extension of the
effect — the reason the vault can say the mechanism was carried *into*
organizations without being lifted *to* them.

## References

- [[claim-fresh-start-effect-requires-subjective-new-beginning-framing]] — foundational mechanism (Dai, Milkman & Riis 2014/2015)
- [[claim-beshears-2021-fresh-start-savings-intervention-stays-individual-level]] — workplace-savings extension, unit stays individual
- [[observation-fresh-start-effect-extensions-stay-individual-not-collective]] — the synthesis her work anchors