Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption with Elizabeth Linos

Dr. Elizabeth Linos, WAPPP faculty affiliate and Faculty Director of The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School, will end WAPPP's spring seminar series by sharing research on the barriers and bottlenecks to evidence adoption at scale. She will present recent research on what factors predict whether data and evidence are used by public sector agencies and will ask us to think about what we can do next to make sure that evidence is useful, usable, and used at scale. 

Dr. Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor for Public Policy and Management, and Faculty Director of The People Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The majority of her research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, she uses insights from behavioral science and evidence from public management to consider how to recruit, retain, and support the government workforce, how to improve resident-state interactions, and how to better integrate evidence-based policymaking into government. Her research has been published in various academic journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Econometrica, The Journal for Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), The Journal of Political Economy, Public Administration Review, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Behavioural Public Policy, and others. Her work has also been highlighted in media outlets including The New York Times, The Financial Times, Forbes Magazine, The Huffington Post, NPR, Slate, and the Harvard Business Review. Prior to joining the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, Linos has been an assistant professor at UC Berkeley; the VP and Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team in North America; and policy advisor to the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, focusing on social innovation and public sector reform. Linos has been named one of the 100 most influential academics in government by Apolitical, one of the top 10 influencers in local government by ELGL, and was the 2023 recipient of the prestigious David N. Kershaw Award and Prize "established to honor persons who, before the age of 40, have made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy analysis and management."

This virtual seminar is part of the Women and Public Policy Program's weekly spring seminar series, Make Work Fair, which gives participants an opportunity to engage with research related to the topics discussed in the book 'Make Work Fair' by Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi. Attendance is open to all.