The heart of NYU Wagner's programs is our faculty. An amalgam of full-time, clinical/research/visiting, and adjunct professors, they are outstanding teachers, expert researchers and committed practitioners.
The heart of NYU Wagner's programs is our faculty. An amalgam of full-time, clinical/research/visiting, and adjunct professors, they are outstanding teachers, expert researchers and committed practitioners.
The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service is home to research and policy centers, institutes, and initiatives that focus on solving urban problems and strengthening public policy and public service nationally and around the world.
Ranked #6 in Public Affairs by U.S. News & World Report, the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service educates the future leaders of public, nonprofit, healthcare and private sector organizations addressing the world's critical issues.
Students arrive at NYU with the desire to serve the public. They leave with the skills and experience to bring about change. Combining coursework in management, finance and policy with cutting-edge research and work experience in urban communities, the NYU Wagner education will enable you to transform your personal commitment into public leadership.
Whether in their first or last semester, students at NYU Wagner have many resources to help them navigate their way to graduation.
NYU Wagner's Office of Career Services (OCS) provides students and alumni with the resources needed to build successful public service careers. Explore our resources for Job seekers and employers.
Welcome to the Wagner Alumni WebPages, where you can find information about resources for alumni from the school, join the Wagner Alumni Listserv and much more.
Read about news and ideas from NYU Wagner faculty and alumni and keep in touch with interesting and useful events at the school.
Both domestically and globally, research by NYU Wagner faculty examines issues of public importance with an eye to making a difference.
With the dropdown below, you can access current projects sorted by subject area.
Rae Zimmerman, Professor of Planning and Public Administration
The ASPIRE project was developed to expose students to multiple disciplines that relate to information security. This would result in scholars who can integrate technical, legal, financial, and behavioral aspects into practical, cost effective solutions that people can depend on. They will also have the training necessary to develop laws and public policies relating to information security and privacy that properly reflect the capabilities, limitations, and implications of technology.
Bethany Godsoe, Executive Director
In partnership with the Mayors Project at Bloomberg Philanthropies, whose aim is to spread proven or promising ideas between cities through a multi-city impact model, Wagner will identify key learnings across cities through the development and implementation Innovation Delivery Teams. These teams, comprised of fellows managed by NYU Wagner, will document and translate learnings into resources other cities can use to develop and deliver powerful solutions to major urban challenges.
Paul Light, Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service
This Project is designed to help opinion leaders and policy experts explore the connection between public service excellence and successful implementation of action on urgent problems such as banking reform, economic recovery, climate change, homeland security, humanitarian aid, and educational achievement.
Paul Light, Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service
Mitchell Moss, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management
This research identifies Manhattan workers' commuting trends over the past decade. In order to pinpoint these trends, researchers examine Census data for Long Island, Westchester, the five boroughs and surrounding counties in order to determine where workers live, gauge their commutes and ascertain whether there is a significant "non-local workforce," (those who live outside the region in places such as Boston and Philadelphia). Additionally, researchers examine isolated demographic information such as income level and occupational description when identifying workers commutes and household locations.
Zhan Guo, Research Director and Assistant Professor or Urban Planning and Transportation Policy
Government regulation requires that developers must provide a minimum amount of off-street parking spaces on a particular site. The objective of this regulation is to prevent developers from overexploiting the free on-street parking provided by government. Because this minimum requirement is often set up based on the peak demand over a year, it has often been criticized as over-supplying off-street parking and contributing to increased traffic congestion, auto dependency, urban sprawl, degraded urban space and reduced housing affordability. Those who oppose minimum parking requirements tote maximum off-street parking requirements as an alternative policy which will help remedy the above perceived ills. However, with the exception of a few sporadic studies on individual developments, no communities in the United States have attempted to implement such a regulation. Therefore, scholars have yet to prove that a switch to maximum requirements would eliminate excessive off-street parking. In contrast, London in UK switched from a minimum to a maximum standard after 2000. This research will collect the minimum and maximum requirements from the 33 boroughs in London, the level of government where parking policies are made, plus building permits for new residential developments from 2004 to the present. Researchers will then match the parking requirement to the new development and identify if there is a gap between “actually supplied” and the “maximum requirement”. The goal of the proposed research is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of a maximum parking requirement in eliminating excessive off-street parking.
Zhan Guo, Research Director and Assistant Professor or Urban Planning and Transportation Policy
Street cleaning is often a heated topic due to its impact on street parking, particularly in dense urban neighborhoods. In 2011 in New York City, three bills which aim to reduce street cleaning will be voted on by the City Council. Supporters of these bills assert that street cleaning forces residents to use their vehicles more often, contribute to increased traffic and air pollution. However, there is no evidence to support such argument. The goal of the proposed research is to investigate the impact of street cleaning on travel behavior. Researchers at Wagner Mobility and the Rudin Center hypothesize that households with off-street parking tend to drive less on street cleaning days but households with only on-street parking tend to drive more on street cleaning days. Researchers will conduct a survey in which households will report their travel behavior. Some will report on street-cleaning days, while others (the control group) will report their behavior on non-street cleaning days. The households themselves will decide if they will fill out the travel survey on street cleaning or non-street cleaning day, therefore providing the researchers with a random sample.
David Elcott, The Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service & Leadership
The Encore project was developed to conduct research that better anticipated the plans of baby-boomers and provide models for retooling Jewish organizations and institutions to more effectively maximize the resources Jewish baby boomers have to offer.
Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics
The Financial Access Initiative (FAI) is a consortium of researchers at NYU, Yale, Harvard and IPA focused on finding answers to how financial sectors can better meet the needs of poor households. Financial access holds the promise to help low-income individuals in developing countries manage their economic lives and build wealth. The Initiative aims to provide rigorous research on the impacts of financial access and on innovative ways to improve access.
Karen Grepin, Assistant Professot of Global Health Policy
Rae Zimmerman, Director / Professor of Planning and Public Administration
This project is working to establish a cadre of technologists and scientists who can integrate technical, legal, financial, and psychological aspects into practical solutions that people can depend on. The new paradigm in security education that we advocate is one where a student is rigorously prepared in multiple disciplines that relate to information security. A graduate from the INSPIRE program will be able to translate the foundational principles of security and privacy into information technologies based on a deep understanding of social, economic, behavioral and public policy implications and requirements.
Mitchell Moss, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management
Researchers focus on mobile technology and its relationship and potential relationship to transportation in metropolitan regions. Primary emphasis is given to the various ways new mobile technologies can provide cost efficient solutions to current challenges in transportation, particularly through smartphones and mobile apps, Near Field Communications (NFC), mobile commerce, open data initiatives. Researchers examine issues of wireless and user/developer demographics across major U.S. metro areas in considering how these new technologies may provide solutions to transportation challenges in the United States.
Mitchell Moss, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management
Much of America's highway construction and maintenance is funded by the federal fuel tax, which has not been increased since 1993. This project explores the challenges that lie ahead in highway finance and highlights the strengths of a flexible pricing model on the Interstate Highway System to maintain long term solvency for the highway account.
David Elcott, The Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership
In Spring 2011, NYU Wagner will offer Advocacy Lab, a new clinical course in which students are introduced to the theory and practice of issue advocacy and community organizing. A collaboration between Professors David Elcott and Erica Foldy, Advocacy Lab is designed to have an impact on a particular social justice issue while creating cohorts of future public service leaders who know and value the tools of organizing and advocacy as methods of social change.
Ellen Schall, Dean / Martin Cherkasky Professor of Health Policy & Management
Jewish Foundation for Education of Women supports and funds students in the Dual Degree Program in Nonporfit Management and Jewish Studies at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service (Wagner School). The JFEW Fellowship at NYU Wagner helps the Dual degree students gain essential skill, experiences, and contacts; at the same time, it would enable JFEW to nurture and prepare future leaders.
Ellen Schall, Dean / Martin Cherkasky Professor of Health Policy & Management
Made possible in part by the Revson Foundation, the goal of the The Mandell L. Berman Jewish Policy Archive (JPA) is to collect and make available online, free of charge, original research and related materials on Jewish life in North America in order to inform policy decisions in the Jewish community. JPA will help scholars, students, lay leaders, foundations, practitioners, and researchers. It will also create a platform for discussion about the major policy questions facing Jewish life in North America.
Zhan Guo, Research Director and Assistant Professor or Urban Planning and Transportation Policy
A metro map is a diagram that shows the relative location, length, and direction of stations and lines in a subway system. It often displays a distorted rather than an accurate spatial layout. Such a map should be able to effect passengers’ decisions on which line to choose, path to take, at which station to transfer, and subsequently the performance of a subway system. This research investigates whether different map designs can help shift riders from one line to another, and mitigate the bottleneck problem in the Washington DC subway system. The DC subway system crosses Potomac River at two locations: Rosslyn Tunnel and 14th Street Bridge. Rosslyn Tunnel serves Orange Line and Blue Line and is currently at capacity. However, the planned Silver Line (under construction) will pass Rosslyn Tunnel, which will create a bottleneck at this location. The transit agency, WMATA, intends to shift 30 percent of the Blue line capacity to 14th Street Bridge lines. The proposed study will test an alternative solution that redesigning the subway map, making the 14th Street Bridge path (between Pentagon and L’Enfant Plaza) appear shorter on the map in order to “mis-guide” riders away from the Rosslyn Tunnel. The various map designs will be shown to recruited participants who will be asked to choose the best path for pre-selected origin-destination pairs. The path choices of the participants in these focus groups will help answer the research question, can a distorted metro map influence passengers’ travel decisions.
Irshad Manji , Director, Moral Courage Project
Launched in 2008, the Moral Courage Project (MCP) aims to develop leaders who will challenge political correctness, intellectual conformity and self-censorship. In the best spirit of liberal education, the project teaches that rights come with responsibilities, that we are citizens rather than members of mere tribes, and that meaningful diversity embraces different ideas and not just identities. Visit the Website
Natasha Iskander, Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Beth Noveck, Visiting Professor
NYU Wagner is hosting a multidisciplinary group of thinkers and doers funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to explore the possibility of creating a Research Network on “Opening Government.” This“pre-network” group will analyze the potential impact of technology on democratic institutions—specifically, how we can use technology to create more collaborative ways of governing to tackle the world’s hardest problems.For more information, visit openinggovernment.org.
Beth Noveck, Visiting Professor
Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the OrgPedia project is developing a free, not-for-profit online directory of data about domestic and international, public and private companies.
OrgPedia will be a comprehensive, open, public data resource and analytic engine for understanding the corporate world. It will collect data about the world’s corporations – who they are, who owns them, who they own, and how and where they operate. It will provide a website, search engine and analytic tools for regulators, researchers, and many others, including corporations themselves, to use this data both to look up information about individual corporations, and also to research interrelationships between companies and industries.
Designed by a consortium of leading technology experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic, MIT, New York Law School and NYU, OrgPedia will be a powerful tool to study the corporate world. It will enable government regulatory agencies to use data about regulated entities more effectively, and will allow researchers in or out of government to import OrgPedia data and analytic tools into their own websites and use OrgPedia to do new analyses and build new applications.
Sonia Ospina, Associate Professor of Public Policy
The goal of this grant is to develop a joint course that advances interdisciplinary work between the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and the Stern School of Business, with Masters students and faculty from both schools working in collaboration and learning experientially through the lens of the latest evidence-based knowledge to solve urgent social problems in a variety of international contexts.
Amy Schwartz, Director / Associate Professor of Public Policy
This research project seeks to examine the impact of school‐level food policies, one of the most promising approaches to influence obesity based on Body Mass Index (BMI) as well as other critical outcome measures. Data on district policies, school practices, and neighborhood context will be gathered via distribution of surveys city-wide to schools, interviews with district personnel, and several school case studies. As other school districts and state and federal policymakers struggle with policy approaches to influence childhood obesity, these results will indicate which policies are successful and worth pursuing.
Mitchell Moss, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management
The purpose of this research is to identify changes in the economic makeup of Manhattan's diverse neighborhoods over the past decade, from the Financial District to Washington Heights. Researchers are interested in how these neighborhoods have evolved economically since 9/11 attacks (2002 to 2010). Researchers will explore and determine if the industries that have become the namesakes of certain neighborhoods (e.g. Financial District, Theater District, Meatpacking District, etc.) are still the driving economic force of those neighborhoods today. Further, researchers examine the "clustering" of industries in Manhattan's neighborhoods, and whether neighborhoods are becoming more concentrated or more diversified in economic makeup.
Jonathon Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics
The purpose of the U.S. Financial Diaries is to record the financial behavior of 300 families. Recordings will be taken from four cities (India, Bangladesh and South Africa). Throughout the course of 15 months, biweekly interviews will be conducted and published in a series of reports. This will be accessible to the general public. This study looks at how low-income Americans are managing their financial lives.