Ford School Public Events

In 2004, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm charged the Lieutenant Governor's Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth with identifying strategies to improve postsecondary attainment and completion in Michigan.

To mark the five-year anniversary of the Cherry Commission, leaders of the education and business communities in Michigan will address the past, present, and future of higher education and economic growth in Michigan.

Pharmacogenomic research offers the potential benefits of personalized medicine and targeted therapies, but it also raises the risk of reinforcing racial differences and stereotypes. Will pharmacogenomics increase the importance of race in American society? This panel explores how racial concepts and categories are influencing scientific, medical, and industrial development in this arena. It will also investigate how policy interventions may allow us to exploit the potential of pharmacogenomics, while avoiding its pitfalls.

Daniel Carpenter, Freed Professor of Government and Director, Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University

Presenter:
Robert Whitcomb: Vice President and Editorial Page Editor, Providence Journal and Goldring Family Distinguished Visiting Lecturer

With Commentary by:
Matthew Wagner: Manager, Wind Site Development, Detroit Edison

Sally Churchill: Vice President and Secretary of the University of Michigan

Sponsored by:
Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP)
Program in the Environment (PitE)
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy

Immigration is increasingly changing the composition of the American population. From 1970 to 2003, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population increased from less than 5% to more than 12%. Though this dramatic increase has occurred disproportionately in a few regions, the effects of immigration are increasingly felt across the country. Alongside this rapid increase, debate regarding the effects of immigration has also ramped up. Key issues in this debate include the possible economic impacts of low-skill immigration on the low-skill native population, and the potential benefits of selective or high-skill immigration to fill key employment gaps.

Experts differ markedly in their beliefs regarding the effects of immigration (economically and culturally) and the appropriate goals of U.S. immigration policy. In Immigration, Public Policy and the Skills Debate two distinguished scholars will present work addressing this important topic. The Ford School engages in this conversation with the goal of furthering a balanced and thoughtful U.S. immigration policy.

'Midwest v2.0: New Innovations, Re-energized Workforce, Sustainable Future' (a Roosevelt Institution Conference). More information.

Mary Jo Bane is the Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management and Academic Dean, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is also the Chair of the Management, Leadership, and Decision Sciences (MLD) and Leadership at the Kennedy School. Prior to that she was Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Bane is the author of a number of books and articles on poverty, welfare, families, and the role of churches in civic life. Her current research is on poverty in the United States and international context.

Co-sponsored by the School of Social Work, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the National Poverty Center, and St. Mary's Student Parish.

Kei Koizumi, Assistant Director for Federal Research and Development, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the President

Thank you to all who came to APPAM Conference reception in DC, it was great to see so many people! Nearly 80 alums attended representing all three programs of study – BA, MPP/MPA, and PhD. Click through the slideshow below to see some photos from the event.

Douglas A. Brook, former Acting Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer, is a distinguished graduate of the Ford School (MPA '67) and will be the 2009 Harry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation Policymaker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

His lecture will address questions about how the U.S. investment in national security should be determined. He will trace the history of defense budgets relative to overall federal spending, then explore the sensitivity of defense budgets to externalities such as presidencies and historical events as well as competition from other discretionary programs and entitlements. Using this base, Brook will then argue that we should consider budgeting for 'national security' rather than 'national defense'.

STPP 2009 Fall Lecture Series

Michele Garfinkel, Policy AnalystJ. Craig Venter Institute

Panelists:
Peter Borish is Chairman and CEO of Computer Trading Corporation, an actively managed hedge fund which focuses on macroeconomic investing.

Charles L. Evans is President, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and an expert on the effects of US monetary policy on economic activity and inflation.

Matthew Shapiro is Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan.

Allen Sinai is President of Decision Economics, Inc. (DE), a global economics, policy, strategy, and financial market information support and advisory firm.

Co-sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics

This panel discussion will present a number of different approaches to urban food retail in the city of Detroit, including: a program that touches on the conventional grocery industry; a program to develop grocery sector entrepreneurs; a new model for community grocery stores; and alternative formats/vehicles for urban residents to get fresh food.

Robert M. Stern, Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Economics of the University of Michigan, is the conference director. The co-directors are Kyoji Fukao, Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, and Kozo Kiyota, Associate Professor of Economics, Yokohama National University. The objective of the conference is to develop new methods and data to measure the factor contents of emerging new modes of international trade. The conference is open to interested faculty members and graduate students. Registration is requested, with a deadline of October 9, 2009. For more information go to http://sitemaker.umich.edu/fordschool-usjapan/conference_agenda

Co-sponsored by A Global Centers of Excellence (COE) Program, Hitotsubashi University; and Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan.

As of October 12, the U.S. Congress has passed out of committee five health care reform bills, and members are poised to begin debating and reconciling these bills into one that may emerge for signing by President Barack Obama within the end of the year.

This panel features five experts in the area of health care and health insurance reform. The panelists span the fields of public policy, medicine, sociology, political science, economics, and public health. The invited panelists will focus on their own areas of expertise to answer two questions: (1) what are the most important things that we need in health care reform, and (2) why getting to any kind of health care reform has been and continues to be so difficult in our country, and what they see as the prospects for reform in this round.

Chuck Hagel is a Distinguished Professor at Georgetown University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is Chairman of the Atlantic Council and a Member of the Secretary of Defense's Defense Policy Board. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Deutsche Bank Americas; Corsair Capital; is a Director of Wolfensohn and Company; Senior Advisor to McCarthy Capital Corporation; and a member of Pfizer's Emerging Markets and European Advisory Boards.

Paul Krugman is an economist and prolific writer who divides his energies among many pursuits: he is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, a centenary professor at the London School of Economics, and, perhaps, his best-known job, an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

Krugman was recently honored for his work on global trade patterns by winning the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In recognition of his influence The Washington Monthly called him 'the most important political columnist in America.'

On September 25–26, 2009 the Ford School will be hosting an all alumni reunion in conjunction with the school's 95th birthday. Please check back periodically for more event details and travel information.

STPP 2009 Fall Lecture Series

David Vogel, Professor of Business Ethics and Political ScienceHaas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley

Should there be boundaries to patentable subject matter? What happens if the patents stifle innovation, rather than promoting it? How should we proceed if patents negatively influence health care, rather than enhancing it? The panel will discuss these questions by focusing on the controversy over patents on the breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA) genes, which led to a current ACLU class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Myriad Genetics. This panel discussion is a part of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Personal Genomics Seminar Series.

Panel discussants are:
Shobita Parthasarathy, Assistant Professor, Ford School of Public Policy, author of 'Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care.'

Sofia Merajver, Professor of Internal Medicine, Director of the Breast and Ovarian Cancer Risk and Evaluation Program, University of Michigan.

Rebecca Eisenberg, Professor, Law School, University of Michigan, and lecturer about the role of intellectual property in biopharmaceutical research.

Co-sponsored by Office of the Vice President for Research, Center for Ethics in Public Life, School of Public Health, and the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education.

Ambassador Thomas Miller, U.S. Ambassador Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1999-2001, Greece, 2001-2004, and President of the United Nations Association. More about Ambassador Miller.

Co-sponsored by Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the International Policy Center.

Professor Danziger is the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Research Professor at the Population Studies Center. His research focuses on social welfare policies and on the effects of economic, demographic, and public policy changes on trends in poverty and inequality. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Director of the National Poverty Center, and Director of the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy. Professor Danziger received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The University of Michigan will host the eighth annual Summer Institute on EITM: Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models this summer, June 15 through July 10, 2009. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this program seeks to leverage the complementarity between formal models and empirical methods.

EITM is training a new generation of scholars to integrate theoretical models more closely, effectively, and productively with empirical evaluation of those models. The Summer Institutes are highly interactive training programs for advanced graduate students and junior faculty. They are led by teams of scholars from across the discipline who are working at the forefront of such empirical-theoretical integration.

Chicago area alumni gathered to meet Dean Susan Collins and connect with other Ford School alumni.

The Charge to the Class will be delivered by Bryan Stevenson, founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. His representation of poor people and death row prisoners in the deep south has won him national recognition. He and his staff have been successful in overturning dozens of capital murder cases and death sentences where poor people have been unconstitutionally convicted or sentenced. His efforts to confront bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system have earned him many national awards including the National Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, the ABA Wisdom Award for Public Service, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Olaf Palme Prize for International Human Rights and the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award.

Stevenson is on the Board of Directors of several organizations, including Partners in Health, Open Society Institute & Soros Foundations Network, Winrock International U.S. Programs, and Penal Reform International. He is a defense attorney and a Professor at New York University School of Law.

Nine graduate students at University of Michigan's Taubman College in the urban planning program and two faculty advisors have explored these issues for the last eight months. They've traveled to communities across North America to highlight innovative practices in the production, processing and distribution of food. Together, these case studies illustrate the components of an alternative: a more community-based, sustainable food system. They reveal the practical steps that individuals, businesses, government and community organizations can take to help build this more sustainable alternative.

CES-EUC's Conversations on Europe: 'Europe's Political and Economic Challenges'

CES-EUC's Conversations on Europe: 'The Impact of the Current Financial Crisis on European (Dis)Integration and on Europe's Economies'

Jan Svejnar, Director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy; Everett E. Berg Professor of Business Administration; and Professor of Economics and Public Policy; and former candidate for president of the Czech Republic. He is also a founder and Chairman of CERGE-EI in Prague (an American-style Ph.D. program in economics that educates the new generation of economists for Central-East Europe and the Newly Independent States). He serves as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of CSOB Bank and Co-Editor of the Economics of Transition. He is also a Fellow of the European Economic Association and Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy Research (London) and Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn).

Dallas Burtraw is Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that conducts independent research - rooted primarily in economics and other social sciences - on environmental, energy, and natural resource issues. He is a 1986 alumnus of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and received his BS in 1980 in community economic development from the University of California-Davis. Burtraw earned his PhD in economics at the University of Michigan in 1989.

Burtraw's research interests include the design of environmental regulation, the costs and benefits of environmental regulation, and the regulation and restructuring of the electricity industry. Recently, Burtraw investigated the effects on the value of assets of electricity generation companies of alternative approaches to implementing emissions permit trading programs. He is evaluating the use of emission trading to achieve carbon emission reductions in the EU. He also has helped to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of trading programs for nitrogen dioxide in the eastern United States and sulfur dioxide trading programs under the Clean Air Act Amendments. He also contributed to the valuation of the benefits of ecological improvements due to reduced acidification in the Adirondacks.

Jan Svejnar was interviewed by U-M New Services about the financial health of Europe in a piece called 'Europe's economy plays large role in global crisis.

Join us as we highlight and celebrate the intellectual achievements of graduate and undergraduate students at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Ford School faculty will nominate students for inclusion, and the posters on display will represent a wide range of student work: from local issues to foreign policy, from social welfare policy to health care reform, from undergraduate work to dissertation research. Students will be on hand to describe their projects and answer questions.

Global Policy Perspectives Syimposium: Terrorists and Their Supporters: Who They Are, What They Think, and How Do We Deal with Them?

featuring William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

Keynote speaker for the Interdisciplinary Group on Poverty and Inequality conference 'Emerging Issues in Poverty and Inequality'

On February 25, sixty alumni from the University of Michigan and other American universities gathered in Paris to network and to learn about European and United States leadership in this time of economic crisis from Jan Svejnar, Director of the International Policy Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

Reception to follow.

Allan Stam, U-M Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies, will discuss the genocide, civil war, vendetta killings and random violence that took place in Rwanda in 1994.

Please join U.S. Representative John Dingell to Discuss Health Care Reform in the 111th Congress

Global Policy Perspectives Symposium: How Well Has South Africa Done Since Apartheid?

Reception and booksigning to follow.

Kristin Seefeldt, a Research Investigator at the Ford School and Assistant Director of the National Poverty Center, will speak from her new book, published December, 2008 by the W.E. Upjohn Institute.

Panelists: John C. Austin, Director, New Economy Initiative & Vice President, Michigan Board of Education, State of Michigan.
Charles L. Ballard, Professor of Economics, Michigan State University & Director of the MSU State of the State Survey
Kim Hill, Director, Automotive Communities Program and Associate Director, Economics and Business Group, Center for Automotive Research.
Christopher Hayter, Program Director, Economic Development Program, National Governor's Association
Moderator: Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries and Harold T. Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan

Hosted by the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy. Co-sponsored by the Ford School of Public Policy. [Details]

Several alumni and former deans, Paul Courant and Becky Blank, participated in an active conversation about several key policy areas, and reconnected with old friends at the networking reception following the panel. A large group of current Ford School MPP students who were in DC for the school's annual recruiting trip also attended.

Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund

The Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy's 2009 Citigroup Foundation Lecture. Co-sponsored by the National Poverty Center and the Students of Color in Public Policy.

Hosted as part of the University of Michiga's 2009 Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Symposium.

Marian Wright Edelman will speak from her new book, The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation, which she wrote as a call to action for all Americans to address the urgent needs of our country's youth.

Prospective students interested in applying to the BA program (admit term Fall 2009) should plan to attend this information session. The BA Program Faculty Director, John Chamberlin, and the Ford School Admissions Staff will walk students through the application process, answer questions about the admissions timeline and speak to the degree requirements.

Jennifer SassSenior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council