Public policy in a complex age

Guian McKee is the White Burkett Miller Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center. He received a PhD in American history at the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2002, and is the author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (University of Chicago Press, 2008). At the Miller Center, McKee co-directs the Health Care Policy Project and serves as co-chair of the Presidential Recordings Program. His research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities.

Rachel Augustine Potter, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the hidden politics of procedure and process in American political institutions, with a particular focus on bureaucracy and regulation. Her book Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019) received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA)Theodore Lowi Award for the best first book in any field of political science, APSA’s Richard Neustadt Award for the best book on executive politics, and the National Academy of Public Administration’s Louis Brownlow Award for the best book on public administration.

Margaret Foster Riley, the Dorothy Danforth Compton Professor at the Miller Center, is professor of law at the University of Virginia’s School of Law, professor of public health sciences at the UVA School of Medicine, and professor of public policy at the University’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She also directs the Animal Law Program at the law school. Riley has advised numerous state and federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Department of Defense; committees of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine; the Virginia Department of Health; and the Virginia Bar.

Mara Rudman is a James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center, where she directs the Ripples of Hope Project, aimed at identifying practical approaches to help democratic leaders resolve key challenges. She serves on the 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission and the Howard University College of Arts and Sciences board of advisors. Rudman also consults for Democracy Forward. She was previously executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress, and her government positions have included serving as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs in the Obama and Clinton administrations; deputy envoy for the Office of the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace at the U.S. Department of State; assistant administrator for the Middle East at the U.S. Agency for International Development; and chief counsel to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She received an AB from Dartmouth College and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Marc Selverstone is the Miller Center's Gerald L. Baliles Professor of Presidential Studies, co-chair of the Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, and a professor of presidential studies. He earned a BA in philosophy from Trinity College (CT), an MA in international affairs from Columbia University, and a PhD in history from Ohio University. A historian of the Cold War, he is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. As chair of the Recordings Program, Selverstone edits the Secret White House Tapes of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. He is the general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition, the primary online portal for transcripts of the tapes, published by the University of Virginia Press.

Robert (Bob) Strong, a Miller Center nonresident faculty senior fellow, is emeritus professor at Washington and Lee University. His research involves presidential foreign policy decisions in the modern era. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin for the 2013-14 academic year and a visiting scholar at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University in 2005. From 2008 to 2013, Strong served in senior administrative positions at Washington and Lee, first as associate provost and then as interim provost. Before W&L, he taught at Tulane University and the University College of Wales. His book publications include Character and Consequence: Foreign Policy Decisions of George H. W. Bush; Working in the World: Jimmy Carter and the Making of American Foreign Policy and Decisions and Dilemmas: Case Studies in Presidential Foreign Policy Making Since 1945. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia.

David Leblang is the Randolph P. Compton Professor of Public Affairs at the Miller Center and the director of policy research. Leblang is also the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed Professor of Politics and a professor of public policy at the University's Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. A scholar of international political economy, Leblang has published broadly on topics including political development, global financial markets, international economic crises, and global migration. His most recent book, The Ties that Bind: The Political Economy of Global Immigration (with Benjamin Helms), was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.