Kimberly Ling Murtaugh

Kimberly Ling Murtaugh is a lecturer in Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

She received her Ph.D. and M.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon University in organizational behavior and theory with a special focus on behavioral economics, judgment and decision-making, and her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in the biological basis of behavior with minors in psychology and Spanish. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Family Medicine at UCLA, Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine.

Dr. Ling Murtaugh’s current research focuses on the use of behavioral economic principles to evoke health behavior change in addiction medicine.

She recently worked with a team creating UN guidelines for methamphetamine use and HIV/AIDS risk worldwide. She has worked in strategy management consulting as well as serving as the Chief Strategy Officer for the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, a national network of researchers and practitioners that develop best practices for treating child trauma.

She is also a founding board member of The Ling Family Foundation.

Barbara J. Nelson

Barbara J. Nelson is Dean Emerita of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Professor Emerita of its Public Policy Department. She is the Founder of The Concord Project, which builds bridging social capital that allows people from divided communities to work together on projects of mutual benefit. While Dean she was a member of the UCLA Chancellor’s Executive Committee and Chair of the Council of Professional School Deans. Prior to her appointment as Dean, she was Vice President and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Radcliffe College (now at Harvard) where her portfolio included all academic programs and strategic planning

Prof. Nelson’s fields of expertise divide into two arenas: social and organizational processes including strategic decision making, conflict mediation, multi-stakeholder decision making, and leadership; and policy topics including social policy, nonprofits, philanthropy, and disability issues. Her research and policy work includes comparing crisis decision making between the British Fighter Command and the German High Command in the WWII Battle of Britain, which will be available in The Most Dangerous Summer. Similarly, Dr. Nelson researches contemporary strategic decision making by American philanthropic foundations. She is also writing a series of linked essays Falling Off the Edge of World: Disability at Mid-Life.

Dr. Nelson is the author of six books and over 85 articles, book chapters, and cases. Leadership and Diversity: A Case Book (2004) demonstrates how linking leadership and diversity improves policy education and policy making. The Concord Handbook: How to Build Social Capital Across Communities (with Linda Kaboolian and Kathryn A. Carver, 2003) provides the ideas and best practices for starting and sustaining organizations that successfully bring together people from groups with historic conflicts. Nelson and co-author Najma Chowdhury won the 1995 Victoria Schuck Award for Women and Politics Worldwide, bestowed by the American Political Science Association for the best book in the field of women and politics. In 1989, Nelson and historian Sara Evans won the Policy Studies Organization’s prize for the best book in the field of policy analysis for Wage Justice: Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform. Nelson is the author of Making an Issue of Child Abuse: Political Agenda Setting for Social Problems (1984) and American Women and Politics (1984).

Barbara Nelson has worked or done research in over 25 countries, and has made major contributions to policy making and civic life in the United States and abroad. She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the UCLA Williams Institute, a legal and policy research center promoting LGBT rights and opportunities. She contributes to the Huffington Post on social equality and cultural issues.

Dr. Nelson’s civic contributions included Co-Chairing of the U.S. National Commission to Reduce Infant Mortality and serving on the board of the Greater Los Angeles United Way. She is a former board member Radcliffe College and its Executive and Investment Committees, the American Political Science Association and its Investment Committee, the National Council for Research on Women, the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, and UCLA Hillel. She was a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Prof. Nelson was a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow and has held visiting fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni , the Russell Sage Foundation, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the USC Price School of Public Policy.

Before her appointment at Radcliffe, Barbara Nelson served on the faculties of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where she was the founder and director of the Center on Women and Public Policy. She earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in political science at Ohio State University, where she was elected to Pi Sigma Alpha, the political science honorary society.

Stephen Commins

Stephen Commins works in areas of regional and international development, with an emphasis on service delivery and governance in fragile states. Commins was Director of the Development Institute at the UCLA African Studies Center in the 1980s, and then worked as Director of Policy and Planning at World Vision International in the 1990s.

Dr. Commins was Senior Human Development Specialist at the World Bank from 1999-2005. His work at the World Bank included “Managing Dimensions of Economic Crisis: Good Practices for Policies and Institutions,” the establishment of the Bank’s children and youth cluster, and a survey of service delivery programs implemented by civil society organizations. Commins was one of the co-authors of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People.  Following the report’s publication in 2003, he managed several initiatives on service delivery in post-conflict countries and the relationships between political reform and improved services.

Over the last decade, he has continued to work on service delivery programs, including the major study, “Service Delivery in Fragile States: Good Practice for Donors,” for the Fragile States Group of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2006.  Some of his fragility and disaster work has included “testing the DFID state building” framework in Lao PDR and Cambodia, managing studies on disasters and safety nets for the World Bank in Bangladesh, a co-authored paper on participation, accountability and decentralization in Africa, and producing studies on health systems strengthening in fragile states for World Vision Canada and on sub-national fragility in India and Pakistan for the HLSP Institute.   He also led a team of policy researchers for the UK government, who produced a policy note and guidance resource for designing Multi-Donor Trust Funds or “Pooled Funds” in fragile states.

He has worked for five years in support of a long-term study of livelihoods and post-conflict reconstruction in Pakistan, as part of a seven-country project with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad and the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI in the UK..  For academic years 2013-15, he worked as the consultation and dissemination coordinator for the World Bank’s World Development Report 2015 (Behavior, Mind and Society). His other projects at that time included a four-country study with the Overseas Development Institute on community-driven development and livelihoods in four South Asian countries, support for World Development Report 2017 (Governance and the Law), and a project on designing long-term urban programs for urban areas affected by the Syrian refugee diaspora (Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey).

His recent work has included designing two workshops, one on urban water and displaced populations and another on municipalities and livelihoods for city officials from Middle Eastern countries impacted by the Syrian diaspora. He also has been involved with the World Development Report 2018 (Education: The Learning Crisis), an assessment of education systems and needs in South Sudan, a study on providing digital skills for young women in low-income countries, and the second phase of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium.

At UCLA, Dr. Commins teaches courses in regional and international development. His current courses are on urbanization in developing countries, climate change, water and health, and disaster management. He is the Associate Director for Global Public Affairs at the Luskin School.

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FILE DOWNLOADS

Livelihoods, basic services and social protection in north-western Pakistan (1).pdf
livelihoods and basic services in NWP.pdf
ter Veen Commins World Vision HSS in FS 2011.pdf
Cities, Violence and Order: the Challenges and Complex Taxonomy of Security Provision in Cities of Tomorrow