Angela Hawken, Ph.D., is a professor of public policy at New York University and director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, a think-do tank. Within Marron, she leads the Litmus lab on government-capacity building and directs 5 faculty and 35 research and practice scholars across five programming areas—Civic Analytics; Health, Environment, and Policy; Human Exploitation and Resilience; Urban Expansion; and Transportation and Land Use; in addition to the Scale + Lab that is scaling behavioral-health emergency-response initiatives in three states. Litmus is an interdisciplinary, practitioner-centered team that works closely with state and local agencies, schools, and nonprofits across 40 states and six countries to implement and test policies, practices, and new technologies. The team empowers “pracademics,” by ensuring that practitioners play a central role in research and the software and other technology they create is centered on their needs.

Hawken focuses on public safety, partnering with police, prosecutors, public defenders, courts, and corrections, as well as agencies in adjacent sectors, including schools, health, and mental health. She directs two centers for the US Department of Justice, on community-supervision for BJA and on family-based justice for OJJDP, and the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which supports DOJ-funded agencies on implementing responses to the opioid crisis. More recently her team is helping prosecutors to harness their own data to improve decisionmaking, through automation of analysis. Prior to joining NYU, she was associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, a research economist at UCLA, and an associate policy analyst at RAND. She has a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School.