NYU Wagner Dean Sherry Glied Chosen as APPAM President-Elect

We are pleased to announce that Sherry Glied, Dean of NYU Wagner, has been elected as President-Elect of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the nonprofit membership organization dedicated to improving public policy and management by fostering excellence in research, analysis, and education.

Dean Glied joined New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service in 2013 as Dean and Professor of Public Service. From 1989-2013, she was Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She was Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management from 1998-2009. On June 22, 2010, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services, and served from July 2010 through August 2012. She had previously served as Senior Economist for health care and labor market policy on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1992-1993, under Presidents Bush and Clinton, and participated in the Clinton Health Care Task Force. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and served as a member of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.

She discusses her APPAM role in an interview, noting that her chief responsibility will be the heavily attended APPAM Fall Conference, whose theme for this year is "Research Across the Policy Lifecycle -- Formulation, Implementation, Evaluation, and Back Again."

" My goal in setting the theme of the conference was to emphasize that policy research doesn’t—and shouldn’t—be thought of as the last step in the policy process.  We sometimes think of the policy process as linear:  it begins with policy development and formulation governed by stakeholders and interest groups, which leads to legislation; then there’s policy implementation through regulations and the activities of the bureaucracy; and finally, there’s research evaluating and analyzing the effects of the policy," Glied said. " There are two problems with that linear story.  First, most policy issues are revisited over and over again, at the legislative level and the implementation level.  The policy process is more of a circle than a line.  Second, as I learned at ASPE [the office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, the principal advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) on policy development] research has value throughout the process—in describing problems and forecasting how various policy responses would likely address them; in studying what institutional, contextual, programmatic, policy, and other factors facilitate or impede effective implementation; in understanding whether and how a policy worked, and how it worked differently for different groups; and then in suggesting how alternative strategies would ameliorate the problems that remain."