Addicted to Gov

Douglas Elmendorf has served as Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School since 2016. Dean Elmendorf served as the director of the Congressional budget Office from 2009 to 2015. He was previously an assistant professor at Harvard University, a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and an assistant director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board.

Today Dean Elmendorf shares his thoughts on the relationship between academia and real world policy making, his vision for the Kennedy School in an ever-changing global landscape, and the challenges and joys of public leadership.

Dara Kay Cohen is a Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research and teaching focus on international security, civil war and gender. Her book, Rape During Civil War (2016) received the 2017 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American Political Science Association, the 2018 Best Book Award from the International Security Studies Section. Dr. Cohen is the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the International Studies Association.

Aaron Huang is a Pickering Fellow and MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has worked in the State Department in East Asia for the last 3 years and will serve in the Foreign Service for a minimum of 5 years upon graduation. Aaron also currently works at the Carr Center for Human Rights doing research on electoral reform.

Aaron shares his perspectives on Chinese-American relations, human rights, and how to better serve the American people through diplomacy.

Ben Mclarey is a senior at Harvard and has worked for the City of Marshfield public works department maintenance team for 3 years. Ben shares his thoughts on the importance of local government, civiv engagement, vocational education, and compulsory national service.

Dr. Rick Wolthusen is a medical doctor and founder/director of NGO, On The Move. On The Move aims to build a mental health infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa and currently operates in 3 countries and has over 100 members. Rick is an MPP candidate, a researcher at Martinos Center for Biomedical Engineering, and also pioneered the Mental Health Caucus at the Harvard Kennedy School to increase awareness about the brain and mental health.

Rick shares his insights about psychiatric methods, stigma and how we communicate about mental health, how to operate a multi-sector NGO sustainably, and how to build better environments to support healthy brains.

https://www.on-the-move.de/en/homepage/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmqVsCx2qVQ

Kevin is an MPP and JD joint degree candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and UC Berkeley. Kevin worked as a legal assistant at Google, legislative director at Child First for Oregon, executive assistant to Governor Kate Brown of Oregon, and Chief Exploration Officer for Passport Oregon.

Kevin shares insight about increasing civic engagement, automatic voting registration, lowering the voting age, and the role of technology in elections.

Chidi Agu is an MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before HKS, Chidi worked with the USC College Advising Corps helping low-income and underrepresented students plan for, apply to, and afford college. As a Data and Policy Fellow, he explored education program evaluation, best college advising practices for matching students to appropriate schools, and ways to institutionalize efforts to increase diversity and access.

Chidi shared his thoughts on education access, how to support first generation college students, affirmative action, reparations, and reframing the conversation about inequality.

"The problem with individualism is that it reduces the responsibility of dysfunctional systems as a matter of personal failure. It is both unfair and unreasonable to expect people to exhibit fundamentally different behavior without also fundamentally changing the environments in which they live and operate."

Chris Geary is an MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School. Chris was a public school teacher in Colorado and subsequently worked on Mike Johnston’s 2018 Colorado gubernatorial campaign.

Chris shares his experiences and perspectives on the charter school debate, systematic inequality and racism, and putting students first in education policy.

“Everyone always says the system is broken, but the system is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do: create enduring inequality. Don’t assume there’s a simple policy solution to centuries of racism in our educational system or that there’s going to be some little innovation you can tap into. But rather go connect with someone who’s been really negatively affected by systematic oppression and go learn from their perspective.”