Deborah Vaughn Aiken, Ph.D. is a Principal Economist at Econometrica, Inc., and former Director of Regulatory Analysis at the U.S. Department of Transportation, where she served as the Department's senior economics advisor and led regulatory economic analysis across all transportation modes. Her career has spanned federal service, academic teaching, and consulting, including positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Product Safety Commission, and Department of Transportation. Her research interests include benefit-cost analysis, risk-informed regulation, regulatory modernization, enabling regulation, and governance of emerging technologies. Drawing on transportation safety, she examines how standards, reporting systems, safety-management systems, and other governance arrangements contribute to information generation, accountability, organizational learning, and regulatory adaptation. Her recent work explores regulatory lag, enabling regulation, and the governance functions performed by self-regulatory and co-regulatory institutions during periods of technological change.