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Letter from the DirectorFebruary 24, 2010 The Center for American Politics and Public Policy (CAPPP) recently celebrated a tenth anniversary. There have been many successes over the past decade that we are building upon into the future. CAPPP has made noteworthy contributions to undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Washington. CAPPP Graduate Fellows have gone on to win dissertation and book awards and many are now placed at prestigious universities. CAPPP faculty have been recognized with a number of research and teaching awards. They have obtained funding from the National Science Foundation and other sources for a variety of innovative projects. These research activities have directly benefited CAPPP Graduate and Undergraduate Fellows and have had a broader impact in courses and in the dissemination of new technologies for teaching American politics. Especially noteworthy aspects of this are the databases developed at CAPPP -- the most noteworthy of which are the Policy Agendas Project and the Congressional Bills Project -- that are now used widely by scholars and students around the world. CAPPP is also increasingly internationally connected. Every year, foreign faculty and students come to Seattle to work with and learn from CAPPP faculty. In recent years we have hosted visitors from Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain. This summer we expect to host our first visitor from Italy. On the agenda. CAPPP is coordinating three research conferences this Spring. The Text as Data conference will be held at Northwestern University this March with the goal of promoting collaborations between Political Scientists and Computer Scientists in the area of computational linguistics. The second, Tools for Text, to be held June 14-15 at the University of Washington, is a National Science Foundation sponsored workshop that will train newer faculty and advanced Political Science graduate students to use computational methods in their research. Finally, the 3rd annual conference of the Comparative Policy Agendas Project will be held in Seattle June 17-19. This conference invites scholars from around the world to share their research and brainstorm on issues related to the systematic study of public policymaking across nations. If you would like to know more about any of these conferences, please contact us at ampol@uw.edu. We are very pleased that Assistant Professor Rebecca Thorpe will be joining our department next year. Rebecca studies defense policymaking in Congress, has been a Fellow at the Brooking Institution and is currently an APSA Congressional Fellow in Washington D.C. Congratulations to our colleague Peter May on being awarded the Donald R. Matthews Endowed Professorship! We are looking forward to a productive spring and summer. CAPPP has some great talks planned, and our graduate and undergraduate fellows are engaged in some very interesting and exciting projects – as usual! John Wilkerson |
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© 2004 Center for American Politics & Public Policy, University of Washington |