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Deming named director of Wiener Center for Social Policy

Photo by Martha Stewart

2 min read

Harvard Kennedy School has named David Deming as the faculty director of the School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. Deming serves as a professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He will start his additional appointment as director of the Wiener Center on July 1.

“We are extremely fortunate that David has agreed to direct the Wiener Center at Harvard Kennedy School,” said Dean Douglas Elmendorf. “David’s outstanding scholarship at the intersection of public policy, economics, and education — and especially his work on education as a means to increase social mobility — make him an ideal leader for the center.”

Deming has conducted extensive research in the areas of secondary education, employment training, and job skills. He is a co-founder of the Collegiate Leaders in Increasing MoBility initiative (CLIMB), a partnership between researchers, policymakers, and a diverse group of U.S. colleges and universities. The goal of the initiative is to better understand the ways in which higher education can more effectively foster social mobility. In 2018, Deming won the David Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management by a scholar under the age of 40.

“For three decades, the Malcolm Wiener Center has been at the nexus of some of the most important social policy debates in this country,” Deming said. “I am honored by the chance to serve the Wiener Center’s proud tradition of improving public policy and practice through scholarship, teaching, mentoring, and outreach.”

Deming succeeds David Ellwood as director of the Wiener Center. Ellwood served as dean of the Kennedy School from 2004 to 2015 and is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy. “I am thrilled that David will lead the Wiener Center,” Ellwood said. “His work on education and mobility is outstanding and so important to society, and he has amply demonstrated his leadership, vision, and commitment to the center in so many different ways.” Elmendorf commented: “David Ellwood has led the Wiener Center with great judgment and dedication during the past three years, as he led the entire Kennedy School during the preceding years as dean. All of us at the Kennedy School are in his debt.”