VICE PRESIDENT: ROBERT D. PLOTNICK, University of Washington
I deeply appreciate being nominated as APPAM’s next vice-president. For 25 years APPAM has been
central to my intellectual growth and my understanding of public policy analysis, management and
curricula. I greatly value APPAM’s extraordinary collegiality, its success in fostering networks, and the
home it provides for applied, multidisciplinary research. I am committed to sustaining these signature
characteristics and to making the Association even more beneficial to its members and the wider policy
research and practitioner communities. I attended my first APPAM conference in 1983 and have
participated in almost every fall conference since then. Beyond conference participation, my
contributions to APPAM include serving on the Fall Conference Program Committee, the Vernon
Memorial Prize Committee, an ad hoc committee that selected a previous editor of JPAM, and, currently,
JPAM's board of editors.

I joined the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington in 1984 after teaching at
liberal arts colleges for nine years. I currently am Professor of Public Affairs, teach courses on
economics, poverty, and social policy, and serve as associate director of the UW’s West Coast Poverty
Center. I have served as the School’s associate dean (1990-1995) and as the director of UW’s
multidisciplinary Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (1997-2002). My research has focused
on U.S. poverty, income inequality, income redistribution and anti-poverty policies, teen and non-marital
childbearing, welfare, child support, and related social policy issues. I am affiliated with the National
Poverty Center at the University of Michigan and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University
of Wisconsin. I have been an adjunct fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a visiting
scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of New South Wales, and the London School of
Economics.