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Director, Burnes Center for Social Change; Professor

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. The author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021), named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review, she is a member of the faculty at Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI. New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. She is also Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

Previously, Beth served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

At the GovLab, she directs better governance programs, including work with public institutions on public engagement in lawmaking (CrowdLaw), sources experts to find innovative solutions to hard problems (Smarter Crowdsourcing), and works with citizens and cities to co-create solutions to public problems (City Challenges). She also coaches public problem solvers, working with passionate individuals to take their public interest projects from idea to implementation.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she is a member of the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress and the EPSRC Centre for the Mathematics of Precision Healthcare. Beth also serves on the International Advisory Board of the NHS Digital Academy and the Yankelovich Democracy Monitor, and as a member of the Inter-American Development Bank, the President’s Commission on Transparency and Corruption, and the Global Future Council on Technology, Values and Policy for the World Economic Forum. She is an Executive Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a member of the Steering Committee for the Collective Intelligence Conferences and GIGAPP (Grupo de Investigación en Gobierno, Administracion y Politicas Publicas) and a Visiting Researcher at Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology Center for Radical Transformation. She is co-editor of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Government Research and Practice journal and a founding associate editor of the Journal of Collective Intelligence.

In 2018, Beth was awarded a Robert Schumann Fellowship at the European University Institute and a Richard von Weizsaecker Fellowship by the Robert Bosch Foundation. In 2021, Beth was named one of the World’s 100 Most Influential Academics in Government by Apolitical. Previously, she was selected as one of the “Foreign Policy 100” by Foreign Policy as well as one of the “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company and “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post.

Beth is also the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard Univ Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005).

Related Schools & Departments

  • Education

    Yale Law School, JD, Law
    Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck, PhD, Political Science and German Studies
    University of Oxford, Political Science
    Harvard University, AB, Social Studies and AM, Comparative Literature

  • Contact

Beth Simone’s Colleagues

Max Abrahms

Associate Professor of Political Science

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Amílcar Antonio Barreto

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Barry Bluestone

Russell B. and Andree B. Stearns Trustee Professor Emeritus of Political Economy; Founding Director of the Dukakis Center; Founding Dean of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Christopher Bosso

Professor of Public Policy and Political Science

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Alan Clayton-Matthews

Associate Professor Emeritus of Economics and Public Policy

William Dickens

University Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Joan Fitzgerald

Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs

Stephen E. Flynn

Professor of Political Science; Founding Director, Global Resilience Institute

James Alan Fox

Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy

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Brian Helmuth

Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy

Timothy Hoff

Professor of Management, Healthcare Systems and Public Policy

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In Memoriam William Kay

Associate Professor of Political Science

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David Lazer

University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences

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Dietmar Offenhuber

Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and Art + Design

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Kwamina Panford

Emeritus Associate Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies