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Evans School of Public Policy & Governance

Category: News and Information

Evans School Maintains Top-Ten U.S. News & World Report Ranking

U.S. News & World Report released its 2020 rankings of the country’s 275 graduate public affairs programs, and the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance will proudly maintain its overall top-ten ranking this year.

Five of our specialization areas were ranked in the top ten, including Environmental Policy and Public Finance & Budgeting, and we have been recognized for our school’s growing expertise with two newly ranked specializations: Local Government Management and Urban Policy.

We are proud that our perennially ranked, top-ten graduate program continues to demonstrate the relevance of our curriculum, the influence of our alumni and the impactful research of our faculty. While this is just one of many ways we track and evaluate our reputation and impact, it is an important reflection of how our academic peers view us, and it is evidence that we continue to receive recognition for the influential work that we do.

These rankings are released annually and are based on reputation and respect among peer institutions. These rankings are representative our leadership and expertise in these areas as an institution. See the full rankings here.

Evans School Receives Diversity Seed Grant to Enhance Equity and Inclusion in Curriculum

Thanks to a new grant from the University of Washington, faculty from the Evans School, the Foster School and the I-School will come together for a deep dive into how to infuse issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their teaching and courses. By participating in the interactive multi-day workshop, faculty will learn and share best practices for inclusive teaching.  

Faculty in these schools face common challenges in teaching professional school students about current issues of equity and inclusion facing public and private, US and global institutions. Leadership from all three schools agreed that faculty are best positioned to create inclusive and equitable learning environments for all students and design courses and curriculum that can incorporate critical issues of equity, power, and privilege. By working across school boundaries, academic partners hope to share resources and knowledge, create a rich learning environment for faculty, and deepen faculty understanding of race, equity, and inclusion. 

Through the four-day workshop, faculty will focus on teaching and classroom strategies that effectively and equitably engage all students. Potential sessions include leading difficult classroom discussions, positionality statements and actions, and inclusive grading and assessment. The workshop will also incorporate expert speakers on the session topics (including students), group discussion, and self-reflection.

The workshop will be an intensive learning opportunity for faculty, who often do not have time devoted to learning about pedagogy or content on equity and inclusion outside of their area of expertise. The desired result is a framework for better-designed classroom activities, student assessment, and course content that extends beyond the core workshop group to other faculty, teaching assistants, and associates as faculty share their new methods and materials. 

Ph.D. Candidate Sarah Charnes Appointed as chair of APPAM Student Activities Committee

Ph.D. Candidate Sarah Charnes has been appointed as Chair of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM)’s Student Activities Committee for the 2020 calendar year after serving as a member of the Committee in 2019. The Student Activities Committee directs student programming for APPAM’s fall conference, oversees other student activities throughout the year, and considers ways to strengthen the representation of students in all APPAM activities and events.

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2020 Evans School Diversity Alliance Student Fellow Announced

Evans School Ph.D. student Vedavati Patwardhan has been selected as the Evans School Diversity Alliance Student Fellow for 2020, the fellowship’s inaugural year. Through this one-year term appointment, Veda will have access to internal and external mentorship and will participate in the April 2020 meeting of all Alliance Fellows at American University.

Vedavati Patwardhan started the Evans School Ph.D. program in Public Policy and Management in 2016. Previously, she spent four years as a project manager for German language scientific publications at Springer Nature . Vedavati earned a Master of Arts in International Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Fergusson College, University of Pune, India. She is a trainee in the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods Program and received a certificate from the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research at Syracuse University (Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs) in 2019. Vedavati’s doctoral work focuses on the intersection of gender, food security and agriculture in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2019, the Evans School became one of six founding members of the Public Affairs Diversity Alliance, an effort to unite the top public affairs and policy schools across the country that share a commitment to encouraging, training, mentoring, and promoting diverse scholars of public affairs and policy. The Alliance, the first of its kind in public affairs, seeks to encourage and sustain a pipeline of candidates for faculty positions in criminal justice, policy, and public administration.

The Evans School is proud to support Vedavati’s contributions to the field of public policy and governance and her development as a scholar of public affairs.

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Russell Sage Foundation Selects Professors Hill, Allard as 2020-21 Visiting Scholars

The Russell Sage Foundation (RSF) announced its selection of 17 Visiting Scholars for the 2020-2021 academic year, including Evans School Professors Heather D. Hill and Scott W. Allard.

While in residence at RSF in New York City, they will pursue research and writing projects that reflect the foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and conducting research to “improve social and living conditions in the United States.” RSF Visiting Scholars address varied research topics from immigration and immigrant integration to climate change and natural disaster recovery.

During her RSF residency, Professor Hill will write a book documenting the experiences of low-wage workers in Seattle during the early twenty-first century as the city experienced rapid population and job growth, skyrocketing costs of living, and a new minimum wage ordinance. Using longitudinal, mixed-method data, she will focus on individuals who work hard to support their families but still struggle to keep up, much less advance, in an increasingly unaffordable city. Hill will draw on data from two RSF-supported research projects on parents working in low-paying jobs in Seattle as its minimum wage law was implemented.

Professor Allard will work on several related projects that examine changing geographical trends in poverty and safety net availability across urban, suburban, and rural America. One project will extend his research on the geography of poverty by focusing on recent spatial trends in both metropolitan and rural areas. A second project examines how nine different safety net programs targeted at low-income adults differ in administration and availability across metropolitan and rural areas. A third project focuses on the spatial distribution of social assistance programs targeted at low-income children. Professor Allard also will begin work on a book manuscript tracing spatial variation in the delivery of contemporary safety net programs in the U.S.

Congratulations, Professors Hill and Allard!

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Evans School Professor Scott W. Allard and Partners Receive Global Innovation Fund Award for Child Poverty, Social Welfare Research

This week, the University of Washington’s Global Innovation Fund awarded Evans School Professor Scott W. Allard $15,000 for a new research collaboration with Professor Jennifer Romich, UW School of Social Work, and Professor Aya Abe, Tokyo Metropolitan University, around child poverty and social welfare policy in the United States and Japan.

Even though there is broad concern about child poverty globally, relatively few studies examine the dynamics of child poverty, its downstream consequences, and the impact of safety net programs comparatively across different countries. Their project “Child Poverty and Mobility: A Comparative Study of Demographic Trends and Policy in the U.S. and Japan” will fill this critical gap in existing scholarship on child poverty and anti-poverty policy through a comparative lens.

Allard and research partners hope this project will foster international collaboration between UW and Japanese scholars around issues of poverty and social welfare policy, increase the research attention dedicated to this topic, and find opportunities for UW graduate students to participate in scholarly exchange about child poverty, the impact of government-led social welfare programs on poverty, and how an individual’s environment affects child poverty outcomes and transitions to adulthood.

To see a complete list of awarded projects in this cycle, please visit the Global Innovation Fund website. The next call for applications will be in Autumn 2020.

About the Global Innovation Fund: The Global Innovation Fund supports faculty-led initiatives to develop new collaborations and programming with a focus on interdisciplinary and international engagement. These innovative projects expand the UW’s global reach, magnify our research impact, and create leading-edge student experiences.

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Evans School faculty support hazard and disaster science research

Researchers from the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, in collaboration with the University of Washington and EarthLab (Project Team), are working to better understand communities’ hazards and disaster science needs and improve the development, synthesis, and translation of current hazards science and research to make it more accessible, relevant and actionable. The team’s goal is to increase community resilience and improve emergency preparedness and planning across the Pacific Northwest, by making regional hazards science and research more locally relevant, accessible and actionable.

According to FEMA’s disaster declarations, Washington State has the 4th largest number of disaster declarations among all states. From the Oso landslide to annual wildfires and severe winter storms to flooding, earthquakes, and tsunamis, all hazard events pose significant risks to residents and to Washington’s economy. Recent Washington State reports call for synthesis and translation of current hazards science to make them locally relevant and actionable, and to better address local hazards and preparedness needs and in order to increase resilience in the region.

As disasters strike, communities realize that they must predict and plan for hazardous events so they can reduce disaster risk. Anticipating these events requires identifying policy and decision makers’ needs for hazards sciences in order to manage and mitigate hazards exposures and its, often disastrous, consequences. Greater collaboration between local, state, and federal agencies, and academic partners promises to help prevent the most horrific outcomes of these events by improving preparedness and response. Engaging scientists in planning and policy discussions is critical to creating effective community-research partnerships.

The Project Team is conducting a series of Hazards Research Coordination Workshops in Washington to better understand communities’ hazards and disaster science needs. The Team will also work to improve the development, synthesis, and translation of current hazards science and research so that it becomes more accessible, relevant and actionable for communities. The workshops are designed with the intention of bringing together local emergency managers, emergency response volunteers, public health and other local officials, and planners to better understand three key questions:

  • What questions would you like hazards researchers and analysts in our region to address?
  • What types of hazard information would be most useful for you?
  • How can the interactions and flow of information between researchers and practitioners be improved?

From these workshops, the Project Team will gather input to distinguish the feasibility of a coordination network to sustain coordination between state-wide practitioners and hazards researchers from across the sciences, over the long term.

Upon completion of the workshops, the Project Team aims to develop an initial prioritized list of hazard information and research needs throughout Washington. The Team hopes this research will increase community resilience and improve emergency preparedness and planning across the Pacific Northwest, by making regional hazards science and research more locally relevant, accessible, and actionable.

Project Team

David Schmidt, Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington
Ann Bostrom, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington
Bob Freitag, Institute for Hazard Mitigation Planning and Research, University of Washington
Phyllis Shulman, William D. Ruckelshaus Center, Washington State University
Amanda Murphy, William D. Ruckelshaus Center, Washington State University

Kyle Elliott (MPA ’16) Named A LinkedIn Top Voice

SUNNYVALE, CA: Kyle Elliott of CaffeinatedKyle.com has been named a LinkedIn Top Voice 2019 by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network.

LinkedIn Top Voice is the social media platform’s highest honor with just 10 of LinkedIn’s 660+ million global users receiving the award for job search and careers.

According to Daniel Roth, Editor in Chief of LinkedIn, “These are people who use every tool available to them on LinkedIn — articles, posts, videos and comments — to give and get help around topics in which they’re experts… If you want to stay inspired and informed, these are the people you should be following.”

“I started my business on Fiverr charging just five dollars for resumes reviews and LinkedIn profile summaries,” shares Elliott. “I never imagined what started as a college side hustle would turn into a thriving coaching practice working with some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent tech executives.”

As a career coach, Elliott works with top talent at Fortune 100/500 companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. He also speaks around the country on topics related to professional development, mental health, and/or social justice.

“I am proud that I get to use my platform to bring attention to topics we don’t talk enough about — like unemployment, mental illness, and queer love. This is how we cure stigma” Elliott added.

Kyle Elliott of CaffeinatedKyle.com was named a LinkedIn Top Voice 2019 – Careers & Job Search.

About Kyle Elliott

Kyle Elliott is the career and life coach behind CaffeinatedKyle.com. He is an expert at navigating Silicon Valley and the high tech space. As a result of working with Kyle, students through c-suite executives have landed jobs at Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and nearly every other Fortune 100/500 company you can think of.

Remembering Great Statesman, Public Servant Bill Ruckelshaus

It is with profound sadness that the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, on behalf of the William D. Ruckelshaus Center, announces the passing of its founder and Chair Emeritus, Bill Ruckelshaus. Throughout his legendary career, Bill held the positions of Assistant Attorney General, Acting Director of the FBI, first and fifth EPA Administrator, and as a leader in the private sector.

Alison Cullen Reappointed to EPA Science Advisory Board

Earlier this month, the U.S. EPA Administrator announced the reappointment of Interim Dean Alison Cullen to the EPA Science Advisory Board (SAB), where she will serve with experts from across the country in providing sound scientific data, analysis, and interpretation in support of environmental regulation.

“The Science Advisory Board is a critical source of expertise responsible for reviewing the scientific and technical underpinnings of environmental regulation for quality and relevance, as well as providing advice to the agency and Administrator more broadly” Interim Dean Cullen highlighted.

Administrator Wheeler named three new members and reappointed seven from academia who were all appointed originally by former Administrator McCarthy and President Barack Obama.  In addition, Syracuse University incumbent Peter Wilcoxen was granted a one-year extension to complete a research project.

“After an open and transparent public process, EPA has appointed or reappointed experts from a wide range of scientific disciplines who reflect the geographic diversity needed to ensure the SAB represents all ten EPA regions,” said EPA Administrator Wheeler.

The new and reappointed members who will begin three-year terms on EPA’s Science Advisory Board include:

  • Deborah Hall Bennett of the University of California, Davis
  • Joel Burken of Missouri University of Science and Technology
  • Janice Chambers of Mississippi State University
  • Alison Cullen of the University of Washington
  • Otto Doering of Purdue University
  • Joseph Gardella of the University at Buffalo
  • Margaret MacDonnell of Argonne National Laboratory
  • Clyde Martin of Texas Tech University
  • Mara Seeley of Massachusetts Department of Public Health
  • Carrie Vollmer-Sanders of The Nature Conservatory

Cullen is known internationally for her work related to environmental and human health policy, wildfire risk management and climate impacts. She has served on the Evans School faculty with distinction since 1994, was chosen to lead the Evans School as interim dean in September 2019 and holds adjunct professor appointments in the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and the College of the Environment.

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