Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., Ph.D.

Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., is the Sydney Stein, Jr., Professor of Public Management Emeritus in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) at the University of Chicago.

Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., is the Sydney Stein, Jr., Professor of Public Management Emeritus in the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the School of Social Service Administration (SSA) at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1983 to 2002 (serving as dean of SSA from 1983-1988). At the University of Chicago, he chaired the Harris School Ph.D. Committee and directed the SSA Management Institute and the Harris School’s Center for Urban Research and Policy Studies and its biannual policy conference, the Chicago Assembly. Lynn is a former professor of public policy and chairman of the Public Policy Program at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and former George H. W. Bush Chair and Professor of Public Affairs in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. He has also held faculty positions at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an academic visitor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

For ten years Lynn held senior positions with the U.S. federal government, including deputy assistant secretary of defense; director of program analysis at the National Security Council; assistant secretary, Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and assistant secretary, Department of the Interior. For his public service, he received the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Medal and a Presidential Certificate of Distinguished Achievement. Subsequently, he has been a consultant to federal, state, and local agencies and foundations and to the World Bank. He has served on the boards of community nonprofit organizations and been an expert witness in litigation involving child welfare administration. Lynn has also organized and served on the faculties of executive and management development institutes and seminars in the United States, Mexico, Europe and Asia. He has also chaired National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council committees on Child Development Research and Public Policy and on National Urban Policy and was a member of the NRC Committee on Education Finance: Equity, Adequacy and Productivity.

Lynn is the first recipient of the H. George Frederickson award for career contributions to public management scholarship of the Public Management Research Association (2005). He is also the recipient of the American Society for Public Administration’s Dwight Waldo Award (2006) and Paul Van Riper Award (2007) and of the American Political Science Association’s John Gaus Award (2007) for lifetime contributions to public administration and management research and service. He received the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management's Vernon Prize and has been a “teacher of the year” at both the Harris School and the Bush School.

Lynn is the author of several books, including, The State and Human Services; Designing Public Policy; Managing the Public’s Business; Managing Public Policy; Public Management as Art, Science, and Profession (which was named best book of 1997 by the Public and Nonprofit Sector Division of the Academy of Management); Teaching and Learning With Cases: A Guide Book (which has been translated into Chinese), and Public Management: Old and New. He is co-author of The President as Policy Maker and Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research (coauthored with Carolyn Hill, PhD'01 and Carolyn J. Heinrich, AM'91, PhD'95), and Madison’s Managers: Public Administration and the Constitution and editor or co-editor of the National Research Council's publications, Knowledge and Policy: The Uncertain Connection, Urban Change and Poverty, and Inner-City Poverty in the United States and of Governance and Performance: New Perspectives and The Art of Governance: Analyzing Management and Administration. He has published extensively in academic journals on his primary research interests: governance and public management, public policy analysis and planning, and social welfare policy and administration. Current projects include a public management textbook (co-authored with Harris School alumna Carolyn J. Hill, PhD’01) and papers concerned with models and methods for the empirical study of governance and public management, and his continuing interests include public choice and institutional theories as applied to the management of public bureaucracies, the executive function in government, and the government's role in human service provision.

Lynn is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University. He is past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and former book review editor of its journal, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Society of Public Administration, the American Political Science Association, the Public Management Research Association, and the International Research Society for Public Management. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals.