Faculty, MA in Public Policy & Administration | Northwestern University School of Professional Studies - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

William Lester

Faculty Director

William Lester is the MPPA faculty director and a scholar of political science, public policy, and public administration. His interests include leadership and ethics, public administration, disaster response, public organization theory, public personnel, and American politics. He has published in Public Administration Review and The Public Manager, among other journals and book chapters, and is on the editorial board of Public Voices. He has a recently published book in the American Society for Public Administration Series entitled Transforming Disaster Response: Federalism and Leadership. Lester was named a 1999 Civitas Scholar and was also a 2009 participant in Minnowbrook III. Lester was named a Fulbright scholar (2013), teaching and researching at The National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He received his MPA and PhD from Texas Tech University with specializations in public administration, American politics, and political theory.

William Abolt

Bill Abolt is a vice president at Aecom Technology Corporation, where he focuses on energy, sustainability, cities, and infrastructure. Prior to joining AECOM, he was a vice president at Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure, Inc. He developed and led its Sustainability, Energy, and Carbon Management National Practice and directed consulting projects for clients, including Wisconsin’s Focus on Energy, Sustainable Chicago 2015, and the Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk. Abolt previously served as Environment Commissioner, Director of the Office of Budget and Management, and Chief of Management, Office of the Mayor, for the City of Chicago.  He was responsible for developing Chicago's strategy to become one of the greenest cities in the United States. Abolt has over 30 years of experience managing complex energy, environmental and public issues and programs. He is a member of the Green Ribbon Committee of the Chicago Climate Action Plan, the Midwest Advisory Council of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Civic Consulting Alliance Leadership Council, the Plan for Economic Growth and Jobs, Neighborhood and Placed-based Assets Strategy Team, and a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow. He has developed and taught graduate courses on public budgeting, energy and climate policy, urban sustainability, intergovernmental management, and capital and development finance. He received his MPA from Northern Illinois University.

Michael Baron

Michael Baron’s background includes more than 30 years of experience in statistics, analytical methods, systems design, curriculum design, risk management, and computer programming. Baron's work includes more than 15 years of experience utilizing SAS and SPSS for statistical analysis and risk management in the context of Public Policy and Administration.  He also has over six years of experience using R programming for statistical analysis and risk management.

Baron has 18 years of practical experience in preparing various types of organizational leaders and educators for the pedagogical, technological, communications, and logistical challenges of the 21st century. A common thread throughout his knowledge and experience in bridging the gap between theory and practice via organizational collaboration, innovative (catalytic) questions, and creative systems design.

Baron has substantial experience helping improve Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) related to the development of more effective learning organizations and corporate resilience and policy design (and implementation). Further, he has expertise in scaling up successful EDI initiatives and programs through evidence-based methods as part of implementation science. A core aspect of these endeavors and leadership roles has been integrating principles of Public Policy, Behavioral Economics, and Cognitive Science and cultivating mutual understandings among employees and cross-functional teams through shared mindsets.

Recent projects include creating innovation infrastructures and ecosystems to facilitate agile, adaptive organizational development, change management, and digital transformation.

Brett Crawford

Brett Crawford is a faculty member at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and has also held visiting positions at Stanford University and the University of Michigan. His research explores how organizations use history and policy to construct institutional meaning. He has also studied how education policy and associations’ codes of ethics shape students’ strategies for success in the health sciences. Crawford’s current research includes a pair of projects funded by separate grants. The first project explores the historicity of environmental associations, specifically how associations have reshaped the identity of actors to both protect the meaning of environmentalism and disrupt industries that threaten that meaning. The second project explores how stigmatized issues are shaped into legitimate categories through the work of organizations. Crawford earned his PhD from Copenhagen Business School.

Grant Driessen

Grant Driessen is an economist with the Congressional Research Service in Washington, DC. He advises members of Congress and their staff on fiscal policy, public finance, and state and local budgeting. Driessen previously worked for the Congressional Budget Office. He served as the primary forecaster for their baseline projections of federal excise tax revenues and customs duties. Driessen’s recent publications and citations include work in Public Finance Review, Tax Notes, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Heritage Foundation, and U.S. Supreme Court Cases. Driessen received his PhD in economics from Tulane University.

* The views expressed in Driessen's course are his alone in the context of an educational setting at Northwestern University, and are not presented nor should they be interpreted as those of the Congressional Research Service or the Library of Congress.

Wendy L. Eaton

Wendy L. Eaton teaches as a Professor and serves as the MPA Director at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). Prior to her work at IWU, she was on the faculty at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Eaton earned her MPA and PhD in Public Administration and Public Policy from Auburn University. Before her academic career, she served as an assistant city manager and has over twelve years of experience in local government management. Her scholarly research has been published in academic journals including Public Administration Review, Public Performance & Management Review, Review of Public Personnel Administration, and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management. She is currently serving on the Editorial Board of Public Administration Review (PAR). Her current projects include a co-edited book focusing on management challenges unique to rural American cities as well as an article focusing on citizen-volunteers and policy implementation.

She is the co-author or co-editor of Local Government Management: Current Issues and Best Practices (2003) and Civic Battles: When Cities Change Their Form of Government (2007). Her work also appears in More than Mayor or Manager: Campaigns to Change Form of Government in America's Large Cities (2010). More recently, her work was published in Alabama Municipal Journal in 2014, 2015, and 2017. She is currently working on a co-edited book focusing on management challenges unique to rural American cities.

Her scholarly research has been published in key academic journals, including Public Administration Review, Public Performance & Management Review, Review of Public Personnel Administration, and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting & Financial Management

Natalia Ermasova

Natalia Ermasova is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Master of Public Policy and Administration Program in the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University, IL, and a full Professor in the Master of Public Administration Program at Governors State University, IL. Ermasova has been selected for a Fulbright US Scholar award for 2023-24 to research and teach at the National University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary.

Ermasova has a PhD in Public Affairs (Indiana University, USA). Her primary research interests are public finance, public administration ethics, leadership, criminal justice, risk management, and public capital budgeting. She was Visiting Professor in Germany (Ludwigsburg Academy for Civil Services), in Hungary (Corvinus University), and Fulbright Visiting Professor (SPEA, Indiana University). Her doctoral dissertation was conducted under the direction of Professor John Mikesell, and it aims to develop a theoretical and methodological framework that explains state capital budgeting. 

More than 60 of her books and articles have been published in the USA and globally. Her co-authored book “Municipal Fiscal Stress, Bankruptcies, and Other Financial Emergencies” was published by Routledge in 2023. Ermasova wrote five chapters in the Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (GEPAPPG) and participated in numerous conference presentations. She was the co-editor of the anthology “Capital Management and Budgeting in the Public Sector: Normative Theory and Practice in a Global Context,” published in December 2018. In addition, she wrote three chapters about capital budgeting in the USA, Germany, and Russia for this anthology. Her articles have been published in State and Local Government Review, International Journal of Public Administration Research, Post-communist Economies, SAM Advanced Management Journal, and Journal of Management Development.

David Faller

David Faller has extensive experience applying the theories of monetary economics and international trade to solve real-life issues arising in international business and financial markets. He started his career as a financial markets trader in Europe. He specialized in the economic and legal issues facing member states in economically and politically integrated sovereign areas. Faller has created and managed derivatives market doing businesses, high-frequency proprietary trading teams and provided advice on currency exposure management issues to multi-national corporations and governmental bodies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. While leading the global treasury activities of a NASDAQ-listed technology company, he was responsible for opening branches in many emerging countries. His knowledge of cultural diversity, trade and tariff regulations and international tax regimes were critical in the country's location process. He has been teaching courses on international business and capital markets to undergraduate and graduate levels students since 2003. Faller holds an MBA from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and did graduate studies at the Europa Instituut, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Angela Fontes

Angela Fontes was most recently a vice president in the Economics, Justice, and Society department at NORC at the University of Chicago. At NORC, Fontes oversaw research focused on household finance and investor decision-making, with a specific focus on the financial well-being of African American and Hispanic/Latino families. A nationally-recognized expert in household finance, Fontes is regularly quoted in national and trade press and is a frequent speaker on financial well-being topics. Fontes is the Principal Investigator on several projects. Two projects include work with the Securities and Exchange Commission to conduct investor protection research and NORC’s ongoing collaboration with the FINRA Investor Education Foundation. Her research is in journals such as the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Family and Economic Issues, the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, and Financial Counseling and Planning. Prior to NORC, Fontes worked in business and market research consulting with Chamberlain Research Consultants and Leo Burnett. Fontes is the incoming President of the American Council on Consumer Interests and the Board of Directors at the Northwest Side Housing Center. Fontes holds a PhD in Consumer Behavior and Family Economics with a minor in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®).

Mollie Foust

Mollie Foust is a practitioner with over 15 years of expertise in systems change, implementation, policy, education, and international development. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she headed Illinois’ initial testing and supply-chain strategy in the Governor’s Office. Prior to the IL Governor's Office, Foust managed national teams on government innovations at the Harvard Government Performance Lab, as well as led research teams in South Sudan and Kenya. She began her career as a social entrepreneur, developing the Flower City Soccer League in Rochester, NY. Foust is a native Illinoisan and lives in Chicago with her husband and son.

Sara Kuehlhorn Friedman

Sara Kuehlhorn Friedman is an adjunct lecturer in the MPPA program at Northwestern. Her research interests include the intersection of civic capacity and governance at the local, state, and federal levels. Before joining the MPPA faculty, she worked for the Center for Public Service at Portland State University as a researcher on various projects and she coordinated research for visiting Korean practitioner scholars from Seoul Metropolitan Government. Friedman currently provides project support for county-level equity assessment projects through the National Policy Consensus Center in Oregon. Friedman is past president of the Cascade Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration and remains active in the national association. Friedman completed her PhD in Public Affairs and Policy at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University, where she explored immigration federalism and focused on issues relating to social equity, civil society, and global governance. Friedman holds a Master of Public Administration degree and a Master of Teaching English as a Second Language degree.

Erna Gevondyan

Erna Gevondyan is a Principal Energy Systems Risk Analyst in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory—the first of 17 U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories tasked with tackling critical scientific challenges. Erna's research involves applying risk assessment techniques in support of efforts in fostering safety at nuclear power plants in developing nations, and other projects focused on the implementation of programs in support of safety at international nuclear facilities. Additionally, Erna's work includes safety research projects in support of U.S. offshore energy. A great deal of this work involves processing large data sets to provide a technical basis to inform the key decision-makers. Erna is a graduate of Northwestern University (MPPA, 2019) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (B.S., Computer Science, 2015). As a transplant from the republic of Georgia—a former USSR republic, and a descendant of Armenian ancestry, Erna is fluent in the Russian, Georgian, and Armenian languages.

Scott Goldstein

Scott Goldstein is an urban strategist specializing in community, and economic development focused on revitalizing and bringing investment to local communities. Goldstein is an urban planning consultant with Teska Associates, a full-service planning firm based in Evanston, Illinois. He leads multi-disciplinary teams to address complex challenges. He has taught courses that focus on global policy and sustainable cities with Northwestern's MPPA program since 2008.

His professional work has focused on affordable housing, fiscal analysis, and development economics. He has led award-winning neighborhood redevelopment plans for Wicker Park, Belmont Cragin, and the Near North Neighborhoods in Chicago. He also works with Habitat for Humanity International and NeighborWorks America, assisting local communities across the U.S. Goldstein volunteers his time with many organizations, including serving as Chair of Mission Advancement for Urban Land Institute Chicago. He was honored as a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2018.

Mark P. Keightley

Mark Keightley is an economist with the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) in Washington, DC. At CRS, he advises Congress and its staff on fiscal policy, business and international corporate taxation, and housing tax policy. Before joining CRS, Keightley was an associate with the Congressional Budget Office and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Rice University, Syracuse University, the College of William & Mary, George Mason University, and George Washington University.

Keightley’s research has been cited by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, U.S. Supreme Court, Government Accountability Office, Federal Reserve of Dallas, Brookings Institution, Cato Institute, Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, Center on Budget Policies and Priorities, Bloomberg, NY Times, CNN, Businessweek, Reuters, Tax Notes, Daily Tax Report, and various academic publications.

Keightley earned his PhD in economics from Florida State University, and his BS in economics from the College of Charleston.

The views expressed in Keightley's course are his alone in the context of an educational setting at Northwestern University, and are not presented nor should they be interpreted as those of the Congressional Research Service or the Library of Congress.

Stephen Kleinschmit

Stephen Kleinschmit is a faculty member within the Northwestern School of Professional Studies. Prior to joining SPS, he was on the faculties of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Western Michigan University. Stephen is known throughout public affairs for founding the Midwest Public Affairs Conference, establishing the Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, and serving on the national council of the American Society for Public Administration. He is also known for his work in public interest technology and civic data analytics, for winning the NASPAA Data Science Curriculum for Public Service competition, and for contributing to the Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age global syllabus project.

Kleinschmit’s research explores the digital transformation of government, data science pedagogy for public service, and spatial causal inference in policy research. Stephen’s research has been published within the Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Global Public Policy and Governance, Teaching Public Administration, Public Integrity, and various other journals. His teaching centers around traditional core subjects in public administration and policy, and includes expertise in civic technology, ethics, and GIS. Stephen received his Ph.D. in Public Administration from North Carolina State University, and is a fourth-generation U.S. Army veteran.

Gregory Kuhn

Gregory Kuhn currently is director of government management consulting at Sikich LLP and was assistant director for public management and training at Northern Illinois University’s Center for Governmental Studies. Kuhn has more than 28 years of combined governmental, consulting, and higher education experience. He was the inaugural faculty director of the MPPA program and continues to be program adviser and lecturer. His primary teaching areas include public policy, leadership, public administration, and budgeting. He also served as an instructor/lecturer for Northern Illinois University’s public administration program. He has earned teaching awards at both NIU and SCS. Kuhn earned an MPA and PhD in public administration, public policy, and organizational theory from Northern Illinois University.

Jerry Lassa

Jerry Lassa is a 30-year health care statistician with professional areas of focus in strategy management, data governance, quality improvement, key performance measures, and dashboard and scorecard development. He led quality improvement and data analytics functions for over 20 years at an academic medical center, community health centers, and a population health solution company. Over the past decade, Jerry has served as a state and national trainer on “Building a Data Driven Culture” topics in safety net clinics and, through his work with the Division of Clinical Research in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, co-authored a publication on “Strategy Management in Collaborative Clinical Research Partnerships”. Jerry received a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and a master’s degree in applied mathematics with a concentration in statistics from DePaul University in Chicago. He has taught statistics and data science at NU SPS for over 25 years and still gets overly excited about pivot tables.

Megan S. Lynch

Megan Lynch is a Specialist at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Services (CRS) in Washington, DC. At CRS, she advises Members of Congressand their staff on the legislative and budget process. During her 15+ years advising Congress, she has completed details in the House Parliamentarian’sOffice and the Congressional Budget Office. Before joining CRS, Lynch worked for Maryland local government and the Maryland legislature. She teaches at the George Washington University. Lynch’s research has been cited by U.S. District Courts, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Budget Office, NY Times, Poltico, Axios, and various other publications. Lynch earned an MPA in public administration from the University of Maryland and was a Presidential Management Fellow.

Karl Muth

Karl T. Muth, JD, MBA, MPhil, PhD, has taught at Northwestern for over a decade and also teaches at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. An expert in the regulation of securities markets and tradeable obligations, his policy research and recommendations have been cited by the Secretary of the SEC, a Commissioner of the SEC, and in many Proposed Rules and Final Rules. Muth has presented research to the SEC, the Comptroller of the Currency, officials at the Treasury Department and HM Treasury (UK), analysts from the US and UK intelligence communities, senior officers of multilateral anti-piracy and anti-money-laundering (AML) task forces, and members of Congress; he was the primary defense expert witness in case involving a billion-dollar alleged corporate financing fraud. His research appears in a wide range of journals, including The Harvard Africa Policy Journal, The Harvard Blackletter Law Journal, The Harvard Kennedy School Review and The Journal of Private Equity, as well as in the Oxford Handbook (Oxford Press) on policy administration and in Controversies in Globalization (CQ Press 2d Ed.), an oft-assigned undergraduate-level text on macro-scale policy questions. Most recently, he presented his research on racial discrimination in the Chicago housing market at the 2023 American Economic Association annual conference and submitted testimony on several key 2023 SEC rules matters.

Maryjane Osa, PhD

Dr. Maryjane Osa is an organizational sociologist (Ph.D., University of Chicago) specializing in social network theory and its applications. She has published one book as well as many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She has also served as Principal Investigator in several large-scale survey research projects. Dr. Osa has taught at the University of Chicago, Collegiate Div., the Politics Department of the University of South Carolina, and at Northwestern University in various capacities since 2002.

Pamela Ransom, PhD

Pamela Ransom, PhD, is active as an environmentalist, planner, educator, and community activist. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her experience involves teaching a comprehensive array of courses in public administration, policy, and program evaluation for over twenty-five years, including faculty appointments at Metropolitan College and Long Island University. In New York City, she was the Special Assistant for Environmental Affairs for the New York City Mayor and Manhattan Borough President for almost eight years. She has worked internationally as Deputy Director for Town Planning for the Government of Jamaica and in programs in Africa. As Program Director for Women's Environment and Development Organization and policy advisor for the Huairou Commission, she has managed global programs on women, environment, health, and urbanization. She also served as a Research Scientist for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and as a consultant for other government agencies, professional and community organizations, including USAID and the United Nations Environment Program. She is a published author in various peer-reviewed journals and an active member of the American Society for Public Administration.

Dr. Jeff Ryan

Dr. Jeff Ryan is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel with an extensive background in disaster response, preventive medicine, epidemiology, clinical trials, and diagnostics development. Dr. Ryan has authored more than 45 scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles. In addition, he has authored five textbooks on various subjects in emergency preparedness and response. During his tenure at Jacksonville State University, Dr. Ryan served as Professor and Head of the Department of Emergency Management. Dr. Ryan is a recipient of the U.S. Army’s Legion of Merit and was awarded the U.S. Surgeon General’s Exemplary Service Medal for leading the Army’s preventive medicine efforts in Hurricane Andrew relief.

Zachary Seeskin

Zachary H. Seeskin is a Senior Statistician with NORC at the University of Chicago. He works on the sample design, estimation, and data analysis for government and public interest surveys. Seeskin further contributes to imputation, adaptive design, total survey error analysis, and small area estimation for such surveys as the National Immunization Survey and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients. His expertise includes analyzing administrative data quality and combining data sources for evidence-building. He has published both research topics in the Statistical Journal of the International Association of Official Statistics and the International Journal of Population Data Science. In addition, Seeskin and colleagues are developing automated statistical tools to assist researchers with evaluating the quality of state and local administrative data sources. Seeskin holds a PhD in statistics from Northwestern University, where he served as a U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellow.

Andy Sharma

Andy Sharma is a political economist whose specialty areas include aging, health disparities, later-life migration, and quantitative methods. Currently, he works with the Cedar Grove Institute on a project to employ statistical methodology to examine the adverse impact of economic and racial isolation on student performance in North Carolina. A research article from this investigation was published in Education Policy Analysis Archives, (Volume 22, 2014). This study was cited and listed under Table of Authorities in an Amicus Brief filed by the Society of American Law Teachers in the Fisher II case with the United States Supreme Court (October 2015). He has also published in other highly regarded journals, such as Ageing and Society, Applied Geography, Disability and Rehabilitation, Journal of Aging and Health, and Women's Health Issues. Sharma is a former recipient of the Carolina Population Center Fellowship with training grants from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. He also received the Future Faculty Fellowship and Weiss Urban Livability Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his PhD. He has master's degrees in mathematics from Loyola University Chicago and economics from DePaul University.

Ricca Slone

Ricca Slone is an attorney and former state legislator. She was a consultant on regional water supply policy and lobbyist on environmental and sustainability issues for the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a regional nonprofit headquartered in Chicago. In the Illinois General Assembly, Slone chaired the Higher Education Appropriations Committee and was vice-chair of the Energy and Environment Committee. She was honored as Legislator of the Year by the Illinois Environmental Council for her work on clean water, land use, smart growth, and sustainable development. She has traveled extensively in India to study the feasibility of distributing solar ovens as an alternative to wood for cooking in off-grid rural areas. Slone has an advanced certificate in international law from Chicago-Kent College of Law. She received a JD from the University of Illinois and an MA in public administration from Ohio State University.

Morris A. Taylor

Morris A. Taylor is Vice-Chancellor for Administration, CFO and tenured associate professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy Analysis at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois. He has served as the department chairperson for six years and chaired the university's planning and budgeting council for four years. Since 1997 at SIUE, he has taught courses in general public management, policy analysis, administrative law, program evaluation, ethics, homeland security, and public safety. Before his academic career, he was an administrator with the Social Security Administration in St. Louis, Missouri. Taylor served as a St. Louis City and St. Louis County police officer during the 1970s; and senior attorney negotiator for the State Farm Insurance Companies. From 2004-2005, he was the Ira Glasser Racial Justice Fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. He investigated and researched racial profiling and police misconduct. His research interests include police organizations, ethics, administrative law, and aspects of civic engagement. Taylor is also an editor for theJournal of Public Management and Social Policy and is a United States Attorneys' Hate Crime Task Force member for Eastern Missouri. Taylor earned his PhD from Saint Louis University in public policy analysis & administration.

Felicity Vabulas

Dr. Felicity Vabulas is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She earned her PhD and MPP in public policy from the University of Chicago and her BS in business administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Vabulas' research focuses on the political economy of international organizations and foreign lobbying. She has three ongoing research projects. Her first project examines when and why states exit international organizations (IOs), including suspensions and unilateral IO withdrawals. Vabulas's second project studies states' increasing use of informal intergovernmental organizations, such as the G7 and G20, rather than traditional IOs, with treaties and permanent secretariats. Her third research project examines how foreign lobbying affects U.S. foreign policy, including altering human rights, trade, and foreign aid allocations. Her research is published in the Review of International Organizations, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and multiple edited volume chapters.