Faculty News

Stephen Trachtenberg was invited to speak to an MBA Class at Georgetown University on Monday, September 21, 2009. (see photo)

Steven Balla recently returned to the U.S. after a year in China as a Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Balla lectured on regulatory policy in China and the United States at Peking University in Beijing. He discussed his views of China with Glen Loveland of the Washington Examiner. (see the article here)

Kathryn Newcomer wrote No easy measure for stimulus success, Washington Business Journal 7/24.

Jennifer Brinkerhoff presented: “Diaspora Organization Capacity Building: A Call and Agenda” at the International Conference on Diaspora for Development, Migration and Remittances Team, Development Economics Prospects Group, and the Migration Working Group, The World Bank, Washington, DC, July 13-14, 2009.

She was also invited to present on and discuss “Diaspora Engagement” with the Office of Policy and Planning, U.S. State Department, July 15, 2009.

Stephen Trachtenberg has a chapter in "Letters From Leaders" Personal Advice for Tomorrow's Leaders from the World's Most Influential People. Complied by Henry O. Dorman The Lyons Press 2009

Kathryn Newcomer gave an invited keynote address at the 32nd Annual Conference of the Eastern Evaluation Research Society on April 21st, in Galloway, New Jersey. Her address was entiteld "Evaluation Bits and Bytes."

On March 30 Prof. Joseph Cordes, Director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, participated on an expert panel at the Bradley Institute for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal that examined the implications of President Obama's proposal to cap charitable deductions at a maximum tax rate of 28 percent.

Professor Philip Joyce was asked "What signs can we read from the Obama administration's recent budget proposal?" by Federal News Radio on March 10, 2009. Click here to listen to his response.

Professor Kathryn Newcomer will be one of the keynote speakers for the annual conference of the Eastern Evaluation Association, in New Jersey on April 21, 2009 where she will speak on "Evaluation Bits and Bytes." She is also one of the invited members of a External Peer Review Team for the U. S Government's HIV/AIDS Program, meeting at the CDC in Atlanta, April 13-15, 2009.

She gave an invited speech in Warsaw, Poland on Feb. 6, 2009 to members of the POlish government on the Use of Evaluation to assess Cohesion Development Projects funded by the European Union. She will give a series of four Webinars on "Obesity-Related Policy Evaluation" for the National Center Institute (NIH) from Feb. 27 through June 12. The series is open to researchers across the world and will be viewed by hundreds of researchers.

On December 2, 2008 she received a Distinguished Service Award from the DC United Way Chapter for her ongoing pro bono work with dozens of nonprofit agencies in the DC area each year.

Kathryn Newcomer received a Distinguished Service Award in recognition of her valuable contributions to the United Way of the National Capital Area on December 1, 2008.

Kathryn Newcomer gave two presentations at the annual conference of the American Evaluation Association in Denver, Colorado, Nov. 5-10, 2008, “Performance Measurement and Evaluation for Program Improvement??? The U.S. Federal Government Experience, and “Evaluation Practice in the Environmental Field: Are We in an Age of Slow Growth, Rapid Transformation or Running in Place?” She also was lead author of a report released in November by the National Academy of Public Administration entitled “ACHIEVING REAL IMPROVEMENT IN FEDERAL POLICY AND PROGRAM OUTCOMES:  THE NEXT FRONTIER” And she with colleague Jed Kee, also a Professor in TSPPPA, she co-authored the lead article of the Fall 2008 issue of The Public Manager, entitled “Why do Change Efforts Fail?”

William Adams, Paul Binkley, Lori Brainard, Jennifer Brinkerhoff, Kathryn Newcomer
TSPPPA was very visible at the 2008 NASPAA Annual Conference in Charleston, SC. Our faculty and staff were panelists on discussion panels of topics including "Public Leadership Education Challenges for the 21st Century", "Structures and Impacts of Capstone Programs: Creating Successful School and Client Relationships", and "Leading and Managing our External Stakeholders: Alumni, Potential Funders, Employers, Partners, Local Governments, and ???". Please visit http://www.naspaa.org/principals/conference/conference.asp for more information.

Jeffrey Brand-Ballard
Professor Brand-Ballard’s paper, “Innocents Lost: Proportional Sentencing and the Paradox of Collateral Damage,” was selected for presentation at the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum, held at Yale Law School in June, 2008.

Also in June, he traveled to Brazil on a Speaker and Specialist Grant from the U.S. State Department and delivered a lecture, “Should Judges Listen to Moral Arguments?” at the following  venues: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School, São Paulo; University of São Paulo Law School; Pontific Catholic University Law School, São Paulo; School of Federal Magistrates, São Paulo; Rio Branco Institute, Brasilia; University of Brasilia

Stephen Trachtenberg and Gerry Kauvar
Korn/Ferry published “Letters to the next President:  Strengthening America’s Foundation in Higher Education” which Steve Trachtenberg and I edited.  The twenty-one essays represent the spectrum of American higher education from Tribal Community Colleges to the Ivy League with all stops in between.  The book is in the hands of every Senator, Representative, Governor, State Higher Education Commissioner, both Presidential campaigns, and a lot of State legislators.  The first printing of 5,000 copies is all gone; more are on the way.  The book will be the focus of discussion by about 400 college and university presidents at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.  Steve and Gerry are working on another book:  “Why Presidents Fail”  which will explore the reasons some college and university presidents do not last even three years and make recommendations on how to change that sad fact.  In addition, they’re writing a chapter on the changing contexts of higher education in this country for publication in a book by the Weinberg Seminar. 

Robert S. Goldfarb
In January 2008 he published “Theory and Models: Terminology Through the Looking Glass,” co-authored with Jon Ratner in EconJournalWatch. Forthcoming articles include “Illuminating Differing Visions of the Modeling-Empirics Nexis: Solow Versus Lipsey,” (with Jon Ratner), and two articles on the economics of nursing shortages co-authored with Marsha Goldfarb and former SPPPA faculty member Mark Long. Current projects include the economics of opt-in/opt-out policies (with Bryan Boulier), an economic analysis of anorexia (with Thomas C. Leonard, Sara Markowitz and Steve Suranovic), and a study of the diffusion of concepts from economics to political science (with Lee Sigelman). 

Chris Sterling
SOUNDS OF CHANGE: A HISTORY OF FM BROADCASTING IN AMERICA (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), co-authored with Michael C. Keith of Boston College.  The study makes clear the central role of government policymaking in the development of FM radio, especially the FCC's decisions to expand the band of frequencies used (1945), to allow multiplexing of signals for "storecasting" which became a vital revenue stream (1955), the approval of FM stereo standards (1961), and the requirement that FM stations program separately from their AM owners (1965-67).  This last was perhaps the most important of all and helped to make FM the most listened-to radio service since 1979.

http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1446

Ralph Mueller

Mueller, R. O., & Hancock, G. R. (2008). Best practices in structural equation modeling. In J. W. Osborne (Ed.), Best practices in quantitative methods (pp. 488-508). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gregory Squires
Recent Publications:

John Atlas, Peter Dreier, and Gregory D. Squires (forthcoming,
September) "Foreclosing on the Free Market: How to Remedy the Subprime Catastrophe," New labor forum 17 (3): 18-29.

John E. Farley and Gregory D. Squires. 2009. “Fences and Neighbors:
Segregation in the 21^st -Century,” in Elizabeth Higginbotham and Margaret L. Andersen (eds.) _Race and Ethnicity in Society: The Changing Landscape_ 2^nd edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 360-368. Reprinted from _Contexts_ 2005 4 (1).

Gregory D. Squires. 2008. “Where is the Debate on Race?” _The Nation_.
www.the <http://www.the/> nation.com. June 18.

Recent Presentations:

Gregory D. Squires, “On Centralized Data Collection,” public hearing of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners Committee on Market Regulation and Consumer Affairs, San Francisco, June 2, 2008.

Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, “Katrina and Racism: There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Forum on “Reinventing Race, Reinventing Racism: The 40^th Anniversary of the Kerner Commission,”
University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, June 6, 2008.

Gregory D. Squires, “Surging Inequality and Emerging Challenges to a More Integrated America," Reclaim Civil Rights-Make Fair Housing a Reality, A National Policy Conference sponsored by The National Fair Housing Alliance and The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Washington, D.C., June 10, 2008.

Gregory D. Squires, “Race and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” Race, Ethnicity, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C., June 12, 2008.

Gregory D. Squires, keynote address at conference on “Leadership Collaboration Innovation: Promoting Justice and Peace,” Academy for Educational Development, New Orleans, June 13.

Stephanie Cellini
Recently published “The Dynamics of Poverty in the United States: A Review of Data, Methods, and Findings” (with Signe-Mary McKernan and Caroline Ratcliffe) in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.  She also published “Causal Inference and Omitted Variable Bias in Financial Aid Research: Assessing Solutions” in the Review of Higher Education.  She presented my paper “Crowded Colleges and College Crowd-Out: The Impact of Public Subsidies on the Two-Year College Market” in Cornell University’s Policy Analysis and Management Seminar.  Stephanie also presented “Financial Aid and For-Profits: Does Aid Encourage Entry?” at the 2008 American Education Finance Association Annual Conference. This summer, she received a grant from the Ford Foundation to pursue further research on for-profit colleges.

Steve Redburn

• Directing study of the Fiscal Future of the U.S., for National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Public Administration, funded by MacArthur Foundation.
• Directing study of how to improve service for returning war veterans, for National Academy of Public Administration.
• Working with SPPPA Professor and fellow NAPA fellow Kathy Newcomer on paper for Presidential transition on how to improve government performance.

William Adams
BILL ADAMS conducted a breakfast presentation for Washington journalists
in June reviewing 2008 election issues based on his book Election Night News
and Voter Turnout: Solving the Projection Puzzle. That same research was
also featured on the GWeb homepage this summer.  In July and early August,
he explored the Uygur Autonomous Region of NW China and saw the total
solar eclipse there on August 1.

Steve Balla
Steve Ball is currently in Beijing for a year at Peking University as a Fulbright Scholar.  He will be teaching classes on the US regulatory system and on research methods.  He will also be looking to make research contacts so that he can do ongoing study of the Chinese regulatory system. 

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff
Jennifer Brinkerhoff has published Diasporas and Development: Exploring the Potential (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2008). The edited volume is the culmination of a GW conference and includes chapters by GW faculty and associates Stephen C. Lubkemann (Associate Professor, Anthropology and International Affairs), Liesl Riddle (Associate Professor, International Business & International Affairs), and Derick W. Brinkerhoff (Associate Faculty, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration).

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff has also published "Diaspora Philanthropy in an At-Risk Society: The Case of Coptic Orphans in Egypt." Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 2008).

Jed Kee and Kathryn Newcomer
Jed Kee and Kathryn Newcomer, professors of public policy and public administration in the Trachtenberg School, just published a book, Transforming Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Stewardship for Leading Change, released in June by Management Concepts. The book has a forward by Admiral Thad Allen, Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard and a GW MPA alum.

Kathryn Newcomer
On May 8, 2008 in recognition of her research, scholarshisp and teaching,  Dr. Kathryn E. Newcomer  GW faculty member, and Director, Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration Program,
Associate Director, The Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, and Director, The Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness received The Elmer B. Staats Award for Accountability in Government. This award, named after the previous Comptroller General of the U.S.,  recognizes individuals or organizations for excelling in studies or analyses of the effectiveness of government programs. Criteria include the innovative nature of the studies, its scope and impact, and the recognition of its importance by peers in the field.

Nancy Augustine
Professors Augustine and Hal Wolman are among the co-authors of the article, "The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility, Education, and Earnings Outcomes," which was published in Housing Studies this past September. The other authors of the paper are George Galster (Wayne State University), Dave E. Marcotte, and Marv Mandell (University of Maryland at Baltimore County).

Edward Berkowitz
Professor Berkowitz had his Documentary History of Social Security published in September, 2007 by the Congressional Quarterly Press. Also during the month of September, he spoke on the presidency before the policy fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professor Berkowitz also consulted with the House Committee of Homeland Security over the summer.

Lori Brainard
Professors Brainard and Jennifer Brinkerhoff co-authored an article entitled “Sovereignty Under Siege, Or a Circuitous Path for Strengthening the State?: Digital Diasporas and Human Rights.” The article was published in the International Journal of Public Administration. She also presented the paper “Government-Citizen Relations in a Virtual Community: Informational, Transactional, or Collaborative?” (with John McNutt, University of Delaware) at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Association (ARNOVA) in Atlanta in November. Professor Brainard also chaired a panel discussing “Socializing New and Junior Faculty,” at the annual meeting of the National Association of School of Public Administration and Affairs to be held in Seattle this October.

Jeffrey Brand-Ballard
Professor Brand-Ballard delivered the Constitution Day address at the College of Wooster (Ohio), under the title, "Must Judges Respect the Constitution?" this past September.

Jennifer Brinkerhoff
Professor Brinkerhoff (Associate Professor, Public Administration and International Affairs) recently published two journal articles. The first is “Diaspora Identity and the Potential for Violence: Toward an Identity-Mobilization Framework.” Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January 2008): 67-88. The second, “Partnering to Beckon them Home: Public Sector Innovation for Diaspora Homeland Investment” (Public Administration and Development, Vol. 28, No. 1 (February 2008): 54-66), is co-authored with GW School of Business faculty Liesl Riddle (International Business) and Tjai Nielsen (Management). Her latest book chapter is “Partnership as a Means to Good Governance: Toward an Evaluation Framework” (In Pieter Glasbergen, Frank Biermann, Arthur Mol, eds. Partnerships, Governance and Sustainable Development: Reflections on Theory and Practice. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishers, 2007: 68-89). She was also invited to write for USAID’s Microenterprise Development Office and the UK Department for International Development (jointly sponsored) Migration Remittance Newsletter, where she explored “Are Diasporas a Partial Solution to Poverty Alleviation and National Development?” (November 2007 issue).

In October 2007, she was invited to speak in the Hague on “Diaspora and Development Research: A Comment on the State of the Moment” for the Policy seminar on Migration and Development: Diasporas and Policy Dialogue, organized by the African Diaspora Policy Centre for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague.

Her Fall 2007 conference presentations included a panel (and presentations) she organized on her recently published co-edited book, NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) for the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) Conference, Atlanta, GA, November 15-17, 2001; and a presentation on “The Importance of Experience in preparing students for international development careers” at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration Conference, Seattle, WA, October 11-13, 2007.

Stephanie Cellini
Professor Cellini was recognized with an honorable mention for the best dissertation in public policy by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management at the November 2007 APPAM research conference. Professor Cellini has a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Vocational Education Research entitled "Vocational College Research: Case Studies of the United States." Felix Rauner and Rupert Maclean, eds.  Springer Publishers: The Netherlands. She also presented "Can School Quality Be Bought? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design," at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's (APPAM) Annual Research Conference and again at The George Washington University U.S. Urban Studies Seminar.  Professor Cellini also presented "Funding Schools or Financing Students: Public Subsidies and the Market for Two-Year College Education," at the George Washington University Microeconomics Workshop and "Regression Discontinuity: the Silver Standard (or Using Regression Discontinuity in Policy Research)," at the George Washington Institute for Public Policy (GWIPP) Methods Seminar. 

Dylan Conger
Professor Conger received a research grant from the Changing Faces of America’s Children Young Scholars Program by the Foundation for Child Development. With support from the Foundation, Professor Conger will study how long it takes students to become English proficient and how the time to proficiency varies according to students’ background characteristics, the grade at which they enter school, and the type of English instruction they receive. Along with colleagues Patrice Iatarola of Florida State University and Mark Long of the University of Washington, she also received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to study the links between high school course-taking and secondary and post-secondary outcomes.  Dr. Conger published “Immigrant and Native-born Differences in School Stability and Special Education: Evidence from New York City,” in International Migration Review and “Which Schools Have the Most Segregated Classrooms? A Look Inside New York City Schools,” in an edited volume entitled Child Poverty in American Today: The Promise of Education.  She also gave three presentations this year, including "Racial Differences in High School Course-Taking in Florida,” at New York University and “Racial Isolation in School: What Are School District Administrators and Social Scientists Overlooking?” at the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) and American Educational Research Association (AERA) conferences.  Dr. Conger served as a discussant on one panel at AEFA and two panels at AERA. She was a panelist at the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration's Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management workshop on doctoral education in public affairs. She is currently the program committee chair for the section on Legal, Judicial, and Intergovernmental Issues for the annual conference of AERA.

Joseph Cordes
Professor Joseph Cordes co-edited the volume Nonprofits and Business: A New World of Innovation and Adaptation with C. Eugene Steuerle which is scheduled to be published by the Urban Institute Press in 2008. With fellow Trachtenberg School faculty member Robert Goldfarb, he also co-authored the article  “Decreasing the ‘Bad’ for Mixed Public Goods and Bads: The Case of Public Sculpture,” which is the lead article in the Spring 2007 issue of the Eastern Economic Journal. Professor Cordes also presented several papers co-authored with Trachtenberg School doctoral students, and colleagues from the Trachtenberg School and the George Washington Institute of Public Policy. These include: “Tax Expenditure Limitations and their Effects on Public Finances” (with Bing Yuan, Michael Bell, and David Brunori) and “Preferential Tax Treatment of Property Used for Social Purposes: Fiscal Impacts and Public Policy” (with Lori Metcalf), presented at the October 2007 Lincoln Land Institute/George Washington Institute of Public Policy Property Tax Roundtable; and “The Effects of Homeland Security Grants on State and Local Spending for Public Safety Preparedness,” (with Charlotte Kirschner) at the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.

Along with David Brunori and Lori Metcalf Professor Cordes also received a $40,000 grant from the Pew Center on the States to collect and analyze data on state tax incentives for economic development. Results of this study will be incorporated into a larger study undertaken by the Pew Center on the States to examine ways in which state taxes and incentives lead - or do not lead - to vibrant state economies.

Robert S. Goldfarb
Professors Robert S. Goldfarb and Joseph Cordes co-authored the article, “Decreasing the ‘Bad’ for Mixed Public Goods and Bads: The Case of Public Sculpture,” published in the Spring 2007 issue of the Eastern Economic Journal. He also worked with Bryan Boulier and Tejwant Singh Datta on “Vaccination Externalities,”  which was published in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Professor Goldfarb presented “Illuminating Differing Visions of the Modeling-Empirics Nexis: Solow Versus Lipsey,” (with Jon Ratner) at the History of Economics meetings at George Mason University in June. An earlier version of the paper was presented at the ASSA meetings in Chicago in January, 2007.

Donna Infeld
Professor Infeld taught Health Policy and Program Evaluation at Renmin University of China as a Fulbright Scholar for the fall 2007 semester.  Renmin University (People's University) has the oldest MPA Program in China.  She will return to GW for the spring semester.

Phil Joyce
Phil Joyce completed work on the 8th edition of Public Budgeting Systems (with Robert Lee and Ronald Johnson), which was published in August, 2007. In addition, he published a chapter entitled “Linking Performance and Budgeting Under the Separation of Powers: The Three Greatest Obstacles Created by Independent Legislatures,” in an International Monetary Fund volume on Performance Budgeting: Linking Results and Funding, published this September. He traveled to Ottawa in June to teach a course on cost-benefit analysis for the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET), jointly sponsored by the World Bank and Carleton University (Canada). Professor Joyce is spending this fall working on the latest iteration of the Government Performance Project (GPP), with a $150,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The GPP evaluates the management of the 50 state governments. The results will be reported in March, 2008 in Governing magazine. Five TSPPA graduate students are currently working on the GPP: Alice Levy, Victoria Bruce, Saurabh Lall, Mackenzie Hawkey, and Robin McLaughry.

Ralph Mueller
Prof Mueller is as an ACE Fellow and Special Assistant to the Provost at the University of Miami, FL during the 2007-2008 school year.

Kathryn Newcomer
In her role as president of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) Kathryn Newcomer delivered the address, “La Certeza de la Incertidumbre en la Gestion Publica Alrededor del Mundo,” at the Annual Conference of the Inter-American Network of Schools of Public Affairs in Bogotá , Colombia. She fully participated in the three day conference there. She also presented a paper with co-author Laila El Baradie entitled “Identifying Leaders’ Training and Development Needs Using the Human Capital Management Perspective: An Application to Egyptian Public Organizations” at the Conference on Leading the Future of the Public Sector: The Third Transatlantic Dialogue at the University of Delaware. Professor Newcomer gave a speech on the leadership role of NASPAA in training public leaders at the Delaware conference. She has recently published a chapter entitled “Assessing Program Performance in Nonprofit Agencies,” in The International Handbook of Practice-Based Performance Management, Sage, 2007.

In addition, Professor Newcomer delivered two keynote speeches. The first, given at  the Annual Evaluation Conference put on jointly by the American Evaluation Association and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia was entitled "Performance Measurement for Program Improvement? The Status of Evaluation in the Public and Nonprofit Sectors in the U.S." The second titled “The Status of Evaluation in the Federal Government: The Shape of Things to Come?”was presented at the 2nd Annual Environmental Evaluators’ Networking Forum in Washington, DC.  During the summer and fall of 2007, Professor Newcomer also served on a National Academy of Sciences Panel charged with evaluating the Post Doctoral Fellowship Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In early October Dr. Newcomer volunteered her services to provide training on outcomes assessment to United Way agencies in Washington, D.C. and Manassas, Virginia.

Gregory Squires
Professor Squires co-authored “Fences and Neighbors:  Segregation in 21st –century America,” with John E. Farley in Jeff Goodwin's and James M. Jasper's (Ed) The Contexts Reader.  New York and London:  W.W. Norton & Company. He also worked with Samantha Friedman, and Catherine E. Saidat on “Experiencing Residential Segregation: A Contemporary Study of Washington, D.C.” in Marlene Kim's (Ed) Race and Economic Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. New York:  Routledge. Professor Squires gave two presentations in Washington, D.C.  The first was delivered at the Institute of Policy Studies and entitled “Predators: The Rise of Inequality and Uneven Access to Financial Services.” The second "Surging Inequality and the Rise of Predatory Lending,” was presented at “Take Back America 2007.”

His lectures also took him abroad to Berlin and Krakow. In Berlin, he presented “Inequality and Access to Financial Services,” at the International Conference of the Law and Society Association and at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, he presented "There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster."  Professor Squires also played the dual role of organizer and lecturer at two conferences, one in New York and one in D.C.  He delivered “Katrina Was Not a Natural Disaster:  What Went Wrong in the Gulf Coast,” to the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation in New York and “Hurricanes Katrina & Rita – Participatory Approaches to Rebuilding Communities,” at the Capitol Hill forum.

Christopher Sterling
Professor Sterling spoke at the 50th annual conference of the Society for the History of Technology in Washington, D.C. in November. He discussed the FCC's changing role in approving technical standards. Professor Sterling also has a forthcoming book entitled Military Communications: From the 21st Century to the Present (ABC-CLIO) with some 330 entries in 600 pages,  scheduled to appear in fall 2007.

Michael Wiseman
In March Professor Wiseman was invited by the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom to be part of a U.S. Congressional and academic delegation to an international conference in London. The conference title was “The New Deals – The Next 10 Years” (The “New Deals” are components of the Labour government’s welfare reform strategy). In addition to conference meetings, the trip included briefings on policy issues/directions by the DWP Strategy Team, DWP staff, and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Professor Wiseman also met with Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Professor Wiseman and Trachtenberg School doctoral student Katrina Connolly have also been working with the Office of Family Assistance of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for the Children and Families and the Social Security Administration’s Office of Disability and Income Support Programs. They are developing innovations for improving processing of applications for the Supplemental Security Income program. Among other things, the project has required developing protocols for data exchange between the two agencies and plans for demonstrations at various locations around the country.

Also Professor Wiseman and Brad Trenkamp delivered a paper, “Food Stamps and Supplemental Security Income,” at the 47th Annual Workshop of the National Association for Welfare Research and Statistics in Charleston, West Virginia. In addition to his appointment in the Trachtenberg School, Professor Wiseman is a Visiting Scholar in the Social Security Administration’s Office of Policy, where Brad Trenkamp works as a policy analyst.

Hal Wolman
Professor Wolman served as an Academic Visitor in the Department of Politics at the London School of Economics from May to August of 2007. He also was a Visiting Academic Fellow in the School of Government at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand from January to April of 2007. Professor Wolman along with Tessa Brannan, Catherine Durose, and Peter John has a forthcoming article entitled “Assessing Best Practice as a Means of Innovation,” which will be appearing in Local Government Studies.  With George Galster, Dave Marcotte, Marv Mandell, and Nancy Augustine, Prof. Wolman co-authored the article “The Influence of Neighborhood Poverty During Childhood on Fertility. Education, and Earning Outcomes," in the September issue of Housing Studies.  Prof. Wolman also co-authored the report "States and Their Cities: Partnerships for the Future," with Ned Hill, Patricia Atkins, Pamela Blumenthal, Leah Curran, Kimberly Furdell, Jo Anne Schneider, and Elaine Weiss for the Fannie Mae Foundation earlier this year.