The AU School of Public Affairs is pleased to add 12 experts to the school in academic year 2017-2018, including faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, scholars and executives-in-residence, and term faculty members.
Elizabeth "Liz" Peters is a renowned economic demographer, serving as part-time SPA scholar-in-residence. Her work focuses on family policies like child support and child care, welfare reform, and family investments in children. Liz has a MPP and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has been on the faculties of the University of Colorado and Cornell University, where she was professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. She is currently an institute fellow at the Urban Institute, where she has been director of the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population.
The work of David Barker, SPA professor and director of SPA's Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, centers on the study of American presidential elections, political parties, political communication, political culture, and political representation.
Ron Elving is senior editor and correspondent on the Washington Desk for NPR News and is now a full-time executive-in-residence for SPA.
Jeff Gill, distinguished professor of government and inaugural director of SPA's Center for Data Science, has research interests that range from political behavioral and institutions to statistical computing and Bayesian inference applied to health issues. He also serves as editor of the journal Political Analysis.
Kareem Jordan, SPA associate professor of justice, law, and criminology and JLC graduate director, focuses on problems facing underrepresented groups in the United States (i.e., socially and economically impoverished groups and racial/ethnic minorities). He is coeditor of the journal Race and Justice: An International Journal.
SPA Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow Adan Murillo focuses on the interaction between poverty and psychological factors within households and schools.
Reginald Wells , the former deputy commissioner of human resources for the Social Security Administration, is now an executive-in-residence at SPA. He also has served as deputy commissioner for the Administration on Developmental Disabilities. Wells has a Ph.D. in psychology from Temple University.
SPA was also joined this academic year by five term faculty members:
Korneliya Bachiyska is a professorial lecturer this year, teaching courses in comparative policies, intelligence, and national security. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from AU.
Kevin Boyle, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, joins SPA as an adjunct instructor, teaching justice, law, and criminology.
Suat Cubukcu, a doctoral candidate at SPA, is now a professorial lecturer whose research focuses on the reporting of terrorism, the understanding of political violence, and policy evaluation.
Jennifer Gumbrewicz is an attorney who has represented Fortune 500 corporations as a civil litigator in construction, antitrust, health care, intellectual property, and insurance cases. A graduate of the AU SPA and Washington College of Law, she is now a professorial lecturer at SPA.
Peter Maida is an experienced mediator skilled in nonprofit organizations, collaborative practice, conflict transformation, prevention, and arbitration who joins SPA as a professorial lecturer. Maida has taught at University of Maryland and George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
For more information about the School of Public Affairs, visit www.american.edu/spa.