Five grad students named Rappaport Fellows

Five Harvard graduate students — Meghan Haggerty, Devin Lyons-Quirk, Jessica Hohman, Antoniya Owens, and Michael Long — are among the 12 local graduate students who will spend the summer working in key state agencies as Rappaport Public Policy Fellows. The students were selected from almost 100 applicants and will be working in Boston’s Office of Administration and Finance, Boston’s Emergency Management Service, the Boston Public Schools, and the Commonwealth Connector the Massachusetts Office of Refugees and Immigrants.

Now in its ninth year, the Rappaport Public Policy Fellowship is a program that gives talented young graduate students from throughout the greater Boston area the opportunity to help public officials address key problems, and in doing so, learn more about how public policy is created and implemented. The fellowship is funded and administered by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, which strives to improve the governance of the region by strengthening connections between scholars, students, officials, and civic leaders.

Rappaport Public Policy Fellows

HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL

Meghan Haggerty will be working in the city of Boston’s Office of Administration and Finance on improving internal operations of the constituent relationship management system in three pilot departments in the city of Boston. Haggerty, who has a bachelor’s degree in social studies from Harvard College, was a neighborhood coordinator for the South End/Bay Village neighborhoods of Boston for Mayor Thomas M. Menino and was an intern for the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

Devin Lyons-Quirk will be helping the leaders of Boston’s Emergency Management Service (EMS) to develop a performance management strategy for the department. The project will involve setting basic performance goals and indicators, collecting relevant data, and analyzing the data to provide useful insights on Boston EMS performance. Lyons-Quirk, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Harvard College, was a senior consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton and was rescue squad EMS captain in the Arlington County Volunteer Fire Department in Virginia.

Antoniya Owens will be working at the Massachusetts Office of Refugees and Immigrants conducting research on immigrant-related topics, such as the impact of abolishing bilingual education in the state of Massachusetts on the academic outcomes of students with limited English skills. Owens, who has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Mount Holyoke College, was a research associate at the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and for LECG’s energy practice group in Cambridge, Mass.

HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

Jessica Hohman, who is the first medical student to receive a Rappaport Public Policy Summer Fellowship, will be working for the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector. Hohman, who has a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and history from Miami University in Ohio and a master’s degree in health policy, planning, and finance from the London School of Economics (LSE), is a visiting research officer at LSE Health.

HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Michael Long, a doctoral student, will work at the Boston Public Schools Department focusing on expanding and improving the school breakfast program. Long has a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University and a master’s degree in public health from Yale University. He has been a research assistant at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and was an account supervisor at Cohn and Wolfe in San Francisco, Calif. In addition to working full time for their host agencies, the fellows will get together weekly to learn more about key issues in the region and to discuss progress on their projects with each other. At many of these sessions, they are joined by 12 law students who are working in similar internships via a fellows program run by the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service at the Suffolk University Law School.