Amy Donahue, associate professor of public policy and chief operating officer for academic administration, has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
The Academy, established by Congress in 1967, provides advice and expertise in proposing solutions to the nation’s public policy challenges. Its fellows include 18 current or former Cabinet members (this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was named a fellow), eight current or former members of Congress, and a number of mayors, governors, and academics.
Donahue, formerly head of the Department of Public Policy in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, recently stepped down to serve as chief operating officer for academic administration in the Office of the Provost.
Her expertise has been sought on a number of investigative and advisory panels. She has advised the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and served on the Return to Flight Task Group after the crash of the space shuttle Columbia. In 2006, she served on the National Mining Association’s Safety Training and Technology Commission, which was formed to identify ways to improve mining safety. From 2004-2007, she was a member of the Congressionally-mandated Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel advising NASA on safety issues. In 2005, she was an advisor to the chancellor of Louisiana State University following Hurricane Katrina.
Her research focuses on the productivity of emergency services organizations and the nature of citizen demand for public safety. She has been the principal investigator on federally funded research on emergency preparedness, including one recent study of how people perceive disaster risk, and how that affects their preparedness.
She received her Ph.D. and MPA from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and her BA in geological and geophysical sciences from Princeton, where she was a distinguished military graduate of ROTC. She was on active duty in the U.S. Army for four years, achieving the rank of captain. She has managed a 911 communications center, and worked as a firefighter and as an emergency medical technician in Fairbanks, Alaska and upstate New York.
Donahue joined the UConn faculty in 2000. She is originally from Old Lyme, Conn.
For a complete list of the new National Academy of Public Administration fellows, click here.
For a Q & A interview with Amy Donahue, click here.
