The University of Massachusetts Amherst

Category: Faculty Honors & Awards

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Faculty Honors & Awards Science, technology & society

Fountain Appointed to Advisory Committee on e-Government in Asia

Distinguished Professor Jane Fountain (political science and public policy) has been appointed to a three-year term as a member of the Experts Advisory Committee of the E-Government Research Center of the Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration (EROPA).

Founded in 1960, EROPA is an organization of states, groups and individuals in Asia and the Pacific designed to promote regional cooperation in improving knowledge, systems and practices of government administration in order to help accelerate economic and social development. Fountain is the only non-Chinese member of the approximately 10-member Experts Advisory Committee.

Earlier this month, Fountain served as the keynote speaker at the first international conference organized jointly by EROPA and the Chinese Academy of Personnel Science, eGovernment Research Center.

Photo: Fountain poses before her invited lecture at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management, China’s top public policy school.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Fountain Delivers Keynote at Asian E-Governance Seminar

Distinguished Professor Jane Fountain (political science and public policy) gave a keynote address yesterday at the International Seminar on E-Government and Modern Governance in Asia. The seminar, hosted by the Eastern Regional Organization for Public Administration, brought together researchers and practitioners of e-governance from around the globe. The two-day session based in Beijing aimed to accelerate the smart and intentional development of e-government throughout Asian countries.

Fountain is a world-renowned expert on using technology to improve government services and accountability: She founded the National Center for Digital Government and has served as chair and vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Brandt Named 2014-2015 Family Research Scholar

Associate Professor Sylvia Brandt (resource economics and public policy) has been named one of seven 2014-2015 Family Research Scholars at the Center for Research on Families (CRF).

Each scholar receives time, technical expertise, mentorship and consultation with national experts as he or she prepares a significant research grant proposal. The program aims to bring together a diverse group of faculty from throughout the UMass community to foster innovation and collaboration across research areas related to the family.

One aspect of Brandt’s research focuses on how asthma affects a child’s quality of life. As a CRF scholar, she will be preparing a proposal titled “New Methods to Assess the Burden of Childhood Asthma in Massachusetts.” Brandt plans to work with a group of leading epidemiologists and policymakers in Massachusetts to develop a risk assessment of the burden of asthma onset due to pollution exposure.

In 2012, Brandt co-authored a paper titled “Costs of Childhood Asthma Due to Traffic-Related Pollution in Two California Communities” that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences named one of the top research papers of the year. The paper not only examined direct health care costs related to childhood asthma, as many previous analyses have done, but also calculated the indirect costs of caring for a child with asthma.

CRF’s mission is to increase research on family issues; build a multidisciplinary community of researchers who are studying issues of relevance to families; connect national and internationally prominent family researchers with UMass faculty and students; provide advanced data analytic methods training and consultation; and disseminate family research findings to scholars, families, practitioners and policymakers. The other 2014-2015 scholars are David Arnold (psychology); Gerald Downes (biology); Marsha Kline Pruett (Smith College School for Social Work); Tatishe Nteta (political science); Katherine Reeves (epidemiology); and Lisa Sanders (psychology).

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Governance Science, technology & society

Fountain Appointed UMass Distinguished Professor

University of Massachusetts President Robert L. Caret has appointed Professor Jane Fountain (political science and public policy) a distinguished professor.

Fountain is a world-renowned expert on using technology to improve government services and accountability: She founded the National Center for Digital Government and has served as chair and vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government. Fountain is also highly regarded in the United States for her research on innovative and effective governance structures.

“We are honored to have Jane as a faculty member at the Center for Public Policy and Administration,” said Kathryn McDermott, CPPA’s acting director. “Jane is a world-class researcher, but also makes a point to convey that research to people in the trenches. She is committed to using her findings to ensure that governments around the world make information more openly accessible to their citizens.”

Long before Fountain had a leadership position at the World Economic Forum’s Council on the Future of Government, she was considered a global expert on the subject. Her 2001 book, Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change, was translated into Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. She has worked with governments and research institutions at the World Bank, United Nations and European Commission, as well as in Japan, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Mexico, Chile, Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

More recently, Fountain’s expertise has been employed closer to home. In 2012 Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick appointed her to his Council for Innovation, which advises the governor on opportunities to use technology to streamline delivery of services to people, businesses and local governments. Fountain is also an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, an independent body that helps government leaders build more effective, efficient, accountable and transparent public sector organizations.

At UMass, Fountain directs the National Center for Digital Government and heads the Science, Technology and Society Initiative, both of which are based at CPPA. The National Center was created with support from the National Science Foundation to develop research and infrastructure for the emerging field of information technology and governance. The Science, Technology and Society Initiative conducts multidisciplinary research on the intersection of science and technology with today’s social, political and economic issues.

Before coming to UMass in 2006, Fountain was a faculty member at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. She earned her Ph.D. in political science and organizational behavior from Yale University; a master of education in administration, planning and social policy from Harvard University; and a bachelor’s degree from the Boston Conservatory of Music.

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Alumni news Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Governance Science, technology & society

CPPA Team Recognized in Collaborative Governance Competition

Lucia Miller (MPPA ’12) and Associate Professor Charles Schweik (environmental conservation and public policy) have received an honorable mention in an international competition of case studies and simulations that focus on collaboration in public management.

The student-teacher duo studied the use in Massachusetts state government of open standards, a topic that has long been of interest to Schweik. They began working together while Miller was in Schweik’s Information Technology class and continued the project after she graduated last spring. Schweik and Miller then submitted their report, titled “The Adoption of Technology Open Standards Policy by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” to the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration (PARCC) at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

“As a very non-traditional graduate student, I was looking to the MPPA program to backfill my 25-plus years of experience in the nonprofit world,” said Miller, who is the development director in the University of Massachusetts’ College of Humanities and Fine Arts. “When Charlie mentioned his interest in researching and writing a case on the Commonwealth’s open standards policy, I jumped on the opportunity to work with him. I knew that not only would I learn a lot, but also would be teaming up with one of the most innovative IT educators and scholars. It was an honor and a great project.”

The winning peer-reviewed studies in the PARCC competition are made available on the program’s website as a free, online resource for educators around the globe whose teaching focuses on collaborative public management, networks, governance, and/or problem solving.

Schweik has been recognized repeatedly for his cutting-edge approaches to both studying and teaching about open-source technology. Last fall he was named one of 2012’s top 50 innovators in education by the Center for Digital Education. Earlier this month he received an award honoring the legacy of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom for his innovative efforts over the last 15 years to study Internet-based collective action, particularly related to open-source software.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Science, technology & society

Schweik Granted Award Honoring Legacy of Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom

Associate Professor Charles Schweik (environmental conservation and public policy) is one of three senior scholars worldwide to receive a new award honoring the late political economist Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to date to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Throughout her career, Ostrom, who died in 2012, focused on demonstrating that “collaboration is possible, frequent and occurs among individuals of different rationalities and in different contexts,” according to the website for the new award. She thereby challenged the previously accepted “conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities or privatized.” As a result, Ostrom dramatically changed the norms that had regulated not only political science and economics, but also social and behavioral sciences more generally. In 2009 she received the Nobel memorial prize “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons,” and shared the award with fellow economist Oliver E. Williamson.

Schweik was recognized with the Elinor Ostrom Award on Collective Governance of the Commons for his innovative efforts over the last 15 years to study Internet-based collective action, particularly related to open-source software. In his book Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software Commons (MIT Press, 2012), Schweik and his former graduate student Robert English analyzed more than 170,000 Internet-based common property projects and tested more than 40 theoretically based hypotheses.

The Ostrom award also recognizes Schweik’s commitment to putting his open-source research into practice in the form of open-education projects. For example, since 2007 Schweik has led an effort to build an international network of faculty that collaborate on open-source geographic information systems education. Over the last couple years he has also worked closely with the University of Massachusetts’ provost’s office and staff at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library on the Open Education Initiative, a program that promotes the production and use of open-access educational materials to engage students and keep their textbook costs down. Last year the Center for Digital Education named Schweik one of the top 50 innovators in education for his cutting-edge use of open-source software in the classroom and as a research focus.

Finally, the recognition also highlights Schweik’s efforts in promoting and mentoring students in the study of “knowledge commons.” Schweik recently founded the Workshop in the Study of Knowledge Commons, which brings together faculty, staff and students on the UMass campus who want to understand new models for producing and sharing information that can feed humanity’s knowledge.

The other senior scholars to receive this year’s Ostrom award were Ben Cousins (University of Western Cape, South Africa) and Harini Nagendra (Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, India). More information on the award is available at www.elinorostromaward.org.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Mednicoff Named Interdisciplinary Studies Institute Fellow

Assistant Professor David Mednicoff (public policy and Middle Eastern studies) has been named a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Studies Institute’s (ISI) 2013-2014 seminar centered around the theme of emancipation.

During the year-long faculty seminar, fellows take turns leading discussions and “inevitably approach [the topic] from their own points of view and disciplinary perspectives,” according to the ISI website. This year’s theme honors the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mednicoff’s research focuses on the rule of law in contemporary Arab societies and their prospects for political democratization. He has served as a Fulbright scholar in both Morocco and Qatar, and most recently has been studying the regulation of migrant workers in Arab countries.

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Care policy Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Misra to Serve as Family Research Scholar in 2013-14

Professor Joya Misra (sociology and public policy) is one of six university faculty members chosen to be a Family Research Scholar at the Center for Research on Families (CRF) during the 2013-14 academic year.

As the selected scholars prepare significant grant proposals focused on family research, CRF provides them with time, technical expertise, peer mentorship and consultation with national experts. The program aims to bring together a diverse group of faculty from throughout the UMass community to foster innovation and collaboration across research areas related to the family.

Misra’s research explores how and why inequalities develop over time across different countries’ poverty and labor markets. Her analyses are focused through the lenses of class, race and ethnicity, citizenship and gender. She has served as the editor of the journal Gender & Society since 2011. The grant proposal that Misra will develop during her time as a CRF scholar centers around a new examination of the relationship between gender and earnings in 18 advanced industrialized countries between 1985 and 2010.

CRF’s mission is to increase research on family issues; build a multidisciplinary community of researchers who are studying issues of relevance to families; connect national and internationally prominent family researchers with UMass faculty and students; provide advanced data analytic methods training and consultation; and disseminate family research findings to scholars, families, practitioners and policymakers. The other 2013-14 scholars are Elizabeth Harvey and Agnès Lacreuse (psychology); Jonathan Rosa (anthropology); Gwyneth Rost (communication disorders); and Lisa Troy (nutrition).

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research

Badgett Honored with University Conti Fellowship

M.V. Lee Badgett, director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration and professor of economics, has been awarded a Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship, a prestigious honor from the University of Massachusetts Amherst that recognizes outstanding scholarly work.

Conti fellows receive a cash prize and a one-year leave of absence to further their research and creative activity. Badgett will spend next year exploring the economic impact that social and legal equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people has on developing countries around the world, as well as on employers in the United States.

“Questions about the economic impact of inclusion of LGBT people often emerge in policy debates,” said Badgett. “People ask, for example, whether discrimination against LGBT people is costly. Or if legal equality for LGBT people will have positive economic effects. Some economists are skeptical about the coexistence of equity and economic efficiency, but we know now that discrimination can make people less healthy and less productive than they can be. Given that context, I’ll be studying how equality for LGBT people in developing countries might be linked to higher economic growth rates.”

Badgett is already a leading global authority on the economics of same-sex marriage. In addition to her positions at UMass, Badgett serves as research director of the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA. Her first book, Money, Myths and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men, countered widely held stereotypes about the economic reality for gay Americans, such as the assumption that lesbians and gay men are more affluent than heterosexuals. In her next book, When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, Badgett explored how the 2001 legalization of gay marriage in the Netherlands has affected public and private spheres in that country.

She was an expert witness during California’s Proposition 8 trial, which examined the constitutionality of that state’s 2008 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage. More recently, Badgett has traveled to Australia and Vietnam to speak with government officials considering expanding rights for same-sex couples. This fellowship will help Badgett develop this latest phase of her research, to examine more in-depth the economic effects that expanded gay rights has on American employers and on developing countries.

The Conti Fellowships honor faculty with outstanding scholarly accomplishments who show significant potential for future distinguished achievements in their research and creative endeavors. In addition to Badgett, Professors Jeffrey D. Blaustein (psychology) and Fred Feldman (philosophy) also received Conti Fellowships this year.

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Faculty Honors & Awards Faculty Research Science, technology & society

University Fellowship Allows Harper to Develop New Service-Learning Course

Associate Professor Krista Harper (anthropology and public policy) has been named a 2013 UMass Service-Learning Faculty Fellow. As such, she receives training and support from the university’s Community Engagement and Service-Learning program to develop a new course with a service-learning component.

Harper is creating the course in collaboration with Gretchen Gano, a lecturer with the Center for Public Policy and Administration. The course, called “Participatory Digital and Visual Research,” will be offered for the first time in fall 2013. While its theme will vary each semester, the graduate course will train students to use participatory digital and visual research methods. Students will learn these innovative skills while working on a community-based participatory research project in the local area.

Next fall Harper and Gano plan to have students work with community organizations in Holyoke and Springfield in order to engage everyday people in discussions about how science and technology could be used to improve their local communities. The efforts of this class will be part of a nationwide program wherein citizens of and stakeholders in six different U.S. cities will deliberate together the possible role of nanotechnology in future urban environments.

While Harper is excited about developing the new course, she is thrilled about the ways in which technology is democratizing research. “Digital and visual approaches to participatory research offer opportunities to open up the ethnographic research process and to share research with a diverse array of audiences beyond the academy,” she said. “These methodologies produce rich visual and narrative data guided by participant interests and priorities, putting the methods literally in the hands of the participants themselves.”