Academic Deans’ Office

David Deming, is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy and the Academic Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also the Faculty Dean of Kirkland House at Harvard College and a Research Associate at NBER. His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also a faculty lead of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative that focuses on building better pathways to economic mobility through the school-to-work transition. He recently co-founded (with Ben Weidmann) the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making. In 2022 he won the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics. In 2018 he was awarded the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40. He served as a Coeditor of the AEJ: Applied from 2018 to 2021. He also writes occasional columns for the New York Times Economic View, which you can find linked on his personal website daviddeming.com

Suzanne Cooper is the Edith M. Stokey Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Academic Dean for Teaching and Curriculum. In this capacity she is responsible for all aspects of the Kennedy School’s teaching mission and works on a broad range of academic and faculty issues, including academic planning, curriculum, SLATE, and educational technology. In addition, she manages faculty teaching and administrative responsibilities and all data analysis regarding faculty and curriculum at Harvard Kennedy School. Cooper previously served as Faculty Chair of the Master in Public Policy program, overseeing all academic aspects of the program. In addition, she served as Director of the Dean's Future Committee on Teaching Programs, providing a comprehensive analysis of Kennedy School degree programs, including an extensive survey of alumni career paths. Her teaching focuses on macroeconomics, empirical methods, and policy analysis. She has an A.B. in Economics from Smith College and a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment and Academic Dean for Faculty Engagement at Harvard Kennedy School, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. They study political violence and its alternatives. At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth has authored or edited nine books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression. Their recent book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know  (Oxford, 2021), explores what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. They also recently co-authored the book On Revolutions (Oxford, 2022), which explores the ways in which revolutions and revolutionary studies have evolved over the past several centuries. Their next book with Zoe Marks, Bread and Roses: Women on the Frontlines of Revolution, investigates the impact of women’s participation on revolutionary outcomes and democratization. Chenoweth maintains the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe. Along with Jeremy Pressman, Chenoweth also co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. since January 2017. Foreign Policy magazine ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth is a recipient of the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. In 2022, Chenoweth was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chenoweth’s book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and the 2012 best book award from the American Political Science Association. Chenoweth’s research has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, Ms. Magazine, NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, TEDxBoulder, The Hidden Brain, and elsewhere. They co-founded the award-winning online magazine Political Violence @ a Glance  and write occasionally for The Monkey Cage  channel at The Washington Post. Their research has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the United States Institute of Peace, USAID, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, among others. At Harvard, Professor Chenoweth is a faculty affiliate at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and the Women in Public Policy Program. They are also a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where Chenoweth and Zoe Marks co-chair the Political Violence Workshop. Before coming to Harvard, Chenoweth taught at the University of Denver and Wesleyan University. They hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton.