It has been a busy few weeks at the Ford School. We are excited to announce the addition of two new assistant professors for this fall. For those of you interested in international policy, we’ve added tremendous strength in the area of international development. Two outstanding scholars will join the Ford School this fall as assistant professors, both with expertise in international development.

Yusuf Neggers is a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His research examines questions at the intersection of development economics and political economy, with a particular focus on the connections between political and bureaucratic accountability and the quality of public services.

Eduardo Montero is completing his PhD in Economics at Harvard University. Originally from San José, Costa Rica, Montero’s interests are in development economics, political economy, and economic history. His research focuses on how variation in institutional arrangements, such as property rights regimes, affect development in Central America and Central Africa.

Many of our faculty have been quoted in a variety of publications recently as well. If you have not yet discovered the news page on the Ford School website, I would encourage you to check it out. We are proud of and excited about the work our faculty is doing. You can find news updates here.

You can also follow other Ford School news via Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms.

We have had a wonderful array of speakers this month at the Ford School. The range of topics is illustrative of the breadth of faculty and student policy interests here. I wanted to highlight a couple that I attended and found extremely interesting.

On January 31^st (so almost February!), we co-hosted a panel discussion entitled Beyond the Wall: The Human Toll of Border Crossings. The panelists included Brooke Jarvis, a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author of Unclaimed, an investigative narrative about an unidentified migrant bed-bound in a San Diego hospital for 16 years and the networks of immigrant families searching for their missing loved ones. She was joined by Jason De León, an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and director of the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term anthropological study of undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States that uses ethnography, archaeology and forensic science to understand this clandestine social process. In recognition of his work on this project, De León was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017. The third panelist was Ann Lin, an associate professor at the Ford School. She teaches courses on public policy implementation, gender and politics, qualitative research methods and immigration. Lin is currently studying potential immigration policies and the beliefs of American immigrants with a special focus on Arab Americans.

In their really moving discussion, the panel shed light on the true human cost of undocumented migration, including many lives lost in crossing the desert, family members who disappear and are never heard from again as well the many abuses endured by these migrants.

On Monday, February 19^th, as part of our Citi Foundation lecture series, we hosted Ana Navarro. If that name sounds familiar to you, you may have heard her on many different news programs. Ana is a GOP strategist and political contributor to CNN, ABC News, and Telemundo.

Ana frequently appears in the media, sought after by Meet the Press, Bill Maher’s Real Time, Anderson Cooper 360, and The View, to name a few. She is in touch with the political issues people are talking about, and in presentations, she discusses the latest hot button issues in politics, giving audiences an insider’s view of the upcoming elections and a roadmap for where the country is headed.

In her wide ranging and entertaining talk, Ana discussed topics such as the state of both the Democratic and Republican parties, the upcoming mid-term elections, gun control, tax reform and immigration policy. Her candor in assessing the situation of the U.S., while sometimes a bit depressing, was refreshing and educational.

If you have not yet checked out the events section of our website, I would encourage you to do so. You can find links to the video stream of past events as well as the schedule of upcoming speakers. Take a look!

Tomorrow, November 30th, our admissions team will be hosting a webinar about our masters’ programs beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST, which will cover both the structure and content of the program as well as the application process. If you are interested, you can find instructions on how to participate here: http://fordschool.umich.edu/graduate-fairs

We will record the webinar and make it available on the website as well. Also, for any applicants who would like guidance from a current masters’ student, you may want to consider participating in our Pipeline Initiative, which pairs a prospective student with a current student who will serve as a mentor through the application process. The priority registration deadline for this program is this Friday, December 1st. More info about pipeline is available on this page: http://fordschool.umich.edu/mpp-mpa/admissions

As always, our admission team is always happy to answer your questions. Please feel free to email us at fspp-admissions@umich.edu or call our office at 734-764-0453. Thanks!

The Ford School is delighted to welcome two new assistant professors to our faculty this fall. We are excited about the new perspectives they will add to our community and how our students can benefit from their research.

Tamar Mitts will earn her PhD in political science from Columbia University in May. She specializes in comparative politics and international relations, with a focus on political violence, conflict, radicalization and extremism.

Before pursuing her PhD at Columbia, Mitts worked as a counterterrorism research officer in the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence and in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mitts holds a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in politics from New York University.

Fabiana Silva will earn her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in June. Her current research seeks to understand the mechanisms that perpetuate or mitigate group-based inequality in the labor market, with a focus on social networks and employer discrimination.

Before pursuing graduate studies, Silva served as a research associate with the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, California. She received her master’s degree in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and her bachelor’s degree in social studies from Harvard University.

As we launch our 2017-18 academic year, there have been a number of exciting developments at the Ford School. At the top of the list is the naming of our new dean this summer. Our previous dean, Susan Collins, reached the end of her term as dean this past year and is on a well deserved sabbatical. Michael Barr joined the Ford School as dean on August 1st, although he has been a member of our faculty for some time. His primary appointment at the University of Michigan was as the Roy F. and Jean Humphrey Profitt Professor of Law at the Law School. In addition to his distinguished teaching career, Michael brings with him a wealth of policy experience.

Mostly recently, Michael worked in the Department of Treasury as assistant secretary for financial institutions in 2009-2010. In that position, he was a key architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Barr played a central role in the development of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and in policies to expand access to capital for small businesses and community development.

Prior to joining the Law School faculty in 2001, Michael served in a number of roles in DC, including serving as a member of the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State and at the U.S. Department of Treasury where he was a special assistant to Secretary Robert E. Rubin before moving into the position of deputy assistant secretary of the treasury for community development policy, a role in which he served from 1997-2001. He concurrently served as special advisor to President William J. Clinton, from 1999-2001.

Since returning to campus, Michael has etablished and directed a new interdisciplinary Center on Finance, Law and Policy, bringing together faculty from across the university on projects designed to help make the financial system safer, fairer and better harnessed to the needs of the real economy.

We are delighted to have Michael serving as our dean and look forward to the new activities and traditions that he will bring to our community.