Over the course of the academic year, three new seminar series brought numerous distinguished researchers to campus, presenting a wide array of perspectives on pressing issues. Each led by Watson faculty, the Global Challenges Research Seminar series, the International Development Research Seminar series, and the Politics and Policies Research Seminar series provided new opportunities for faculty and students to engage with one another across traditional academic boundaries. The series fostered deeper engagement not only among Watson faculty but also with colleagues across Brown who have been less connected to Watson in the past.
Building for the school’s next phase
A newly developed strategic plan outlines the Watson School’s growth plans, including an ambitious goal to double the faculty over the next five years, launch new research centers, and expand its graduate programs.
This year, external searches resulted in three new faculty hires: two with joint appointments in the Department of Economics and one in the Department of Sociology. Pablo Ottonello, the principal research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Fabrizio Perri, the deputy director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, will join the ranks of Watson’s faculty on July 1. They will be joined by Keitaro Okura, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Yale University, whose research focuses on immigration.
Joining the School’s faculty from within Brown are Schreiber Family Professor of Economics Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan and Nicole Pangborn. Kalemli-Özcan earned her Ph.D. in economics from Brown in 2000 and joined Brown’s economics department in 2023. She will bring her Global Linkages Lab into the Watson School as a new research policy lab. For the past two years, Pangborn has served as a visiting lecturer in international and public affairs, and will join the faculty as an assistant teaching professor. She will teach in both the Master of Public Affairs (MPA) and undergraduate International and Public Affairs (IAPA) programs, and serve as director of the undergraduate honors program.
Further faculty growth will be funded in part by a generous $12 million gift from the Bravo Family Foundation, founded by Brown University alumnus Orlando Bravo. The gift will fund the establishment of two endowed professorships and support research on pivotal economic and policy issues, bolstering research and teaching in the Department of Economics and the Watson School.
In addition to faculty growth, the Watson School will be adding a new degree program beginning in January 2027. The online Master of Public Policy (MPP) program is a 16-month asynchronous, online degree program designed for working professionals, who will be invited to bring real-world challenges into the classroom. The online MPP program will include coursework on statistics, economics, politics, policy analysis, leadership, stakeholder engagement and social policy. With an emphasis on rigorous, data-driven analysis, the program will provide students with the tools needed to tackle today’s most pressing policy problems.
The Watson School remains dedicated to creating policy-focused learning experiences that train students to change systems and societies for the better at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. With the school launch, Watson’s Master of Public Affairs (MPA) program is being reimagined and expanded to more closely align with the School’s faculty strengths and global focus.
Friedman noted that one significant benefit of the school expansion is that it creates the opportunity for greater faculty engagement with the MPA program and its students. “The School launch has allowed us to expand the set of learning opportunities in our MPA program,” he said, “particularly by offering more classes taught by core faculty and in which students engage deeply with our faculty’s policy expertise.”
At least ten new or redesigned courses will be taught exclusively by Watson faculty in the coming year. The program will also incorporate five new specialization tracks: Global Security; International Finance and Economics; International Development; Climate, Energy and Environmental Policy; and Social and Economic Policy. Each track includes a set of interconnected courses that teach students how to integrate a wide range of perspectives and approaches and ultimately how to apply them to real-world situations.
Broadening the scope of research
The Watson School model of bringing together academics and policy professionals from numerous disciplines predates the School and is consistent with the long-standing academic ethos of the University itself. But, with the change in status to a school, Friedman says Watson is seizing the opportunity to further break down traditional barriers between disciplines and expand its areas of expertise.
For Friedman, who served as a special assistant to the President for Economic Policy during the Obama administration, the need for boundary-crossing research is obvious. “No government holds separate policy meetings for each discipline,” he said. “The Watson School’s strength lies in our ability to generate in our research and teaching the kind of interdisciplinary engagement necessary to solve pressing problems.”
Friedman noted that technology is a critical part of addressing current global challenges, including issues such as climate change and the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). "Watson's interdisciplinary structure is ideally suited to bring scholars together to understand the complex ways that technology will affect the policy environment,” he said.
“Watson will engage broadly on ways that AI and other emerging technologies will create new policy opportunities or challenges,” said Friedman. “We will think well beyond what policy should be to regulate AI,” he said, noting that the implications of the new technology are much broader.
“AI might change the way we think about national security, about the operation of the criminal justice system, and about the need for education and training in the face of workforce disruption,” he said. “We need to prepare our students for the complex technological landscape they will face after graduation.”
In the coming year, Watson will add three new faculty fellows from Brown’s Department of Computer Science, Serena Booth, Suresh Venkatasubramanian and Ernie Zaldivar, as well as Tomo Lazovich from Brown’s Data Science Institute, in order to strengthen its presence in the technology arena.
“There are so many faculty already here at Brown, doing great policy-relevant work, in departments as broad as computer science, cognitive psychology, public health, history and many others,” said Friedman. “One of Watson’s great strengths is our interdisciplinary structure, where we can engage this wide range of Brown faculty as part of our school community.”
With the growing faculty and broader scope of research, the School also plans to expand its research centers and labs.
In addition to Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan’s Global Linkages Lab coming into the Watson fold as a new research policy lab, there are plans for several new centers and labs. “As the school grows,” said Friedman, “we will not only be adding faculty but also developing our capacity to support frontier policy research through the creation of new centers, initiatives and policy research labs. These new programs will also create new opportunities for our students to engage in experiential learning experiences.”
With a successful inaugural year completed and a five-year strategic plan in place, Friedman said the Watson School moves into its second year in a strong position to build on its reputation as a leading policy school. “As we add new faculty both through external hires and internal additions and refine our curriculum,” he said, “the School will build on the foundation of its inaugural year to continue to develop cutting-edge teaching and research that is not confined by traditional academic boundaries.”
