We’re happy to share that professor Sam Zuhlke’s article, “Strike While the Iron is Hot: Land Trusts, Temperature Anomalies, and Agenda Setting for Local Open Space Referenda” has been published in the journal Nonprofit Policy Forum.

We are happy to share that faculty in the School of Planning and Public Affairs have been very productive this past year in their research and have authored numerous publications in scholarly journals.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz (Associate Professor, UI School of Planning & Public Affairs) has been honored with the 2023 Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant for her forthcoming book The Indian Card. The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant is awarded to writers in the process of finishing insightful and well-researched works of nonfiction.

Professor Samantha Zuhlke has received the Gabriel G. Rudney Memorial Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research for her dissertation, “A Political Theory of Nonprofits: Partisanship Policy and the Rise of the Nonprofit Sector.”

Professor Jerry Anthony was awarded a Fulbright Scholar award to research sustainable urbanism in India during the 2022-2023 academic year. Second-year public affairs student, Stephanie Gutierrez, recently interviewed him about his experience.

Samantha Zuhlke will participate in the Civil Society and Sustainability Conference to be hosted by the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University in late May, based on her designation as a “cutting-edge scholar.”

Associate Professor Scott Spak was recently appointed to the Environmental Protection Agency's Science Advisory Board (SAB).

Samantha Zuhlke's new book, The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government, has recently been published and is now available from Cambridge University Press.

Associate Professor Phuong Nguyen recently received Best Paper Award from the Midwest Public Affairs Conference. The paper, “Impact of home rule on municipal boundary and fiscal expansion: Evidence from Texas,” is forthcoming in the Journal of Regional Science.

Assistant Professor Sam Zuhlke’s research article, “Acres for the Affluent: An Interactive Model of Nonprofit Resources and Demand Heterogeneity” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.

Three School of Planning and Public Affairs faculty will work with colleagues in the School of Library and Information Science, the Department of Sociology and the Tippie College of Business on a $150,000 interdisciplinary grant to evaluate how public libraries mitigate community vulnerabilities and build resilience to climate, social, and economic risks.

Travis Kraus, Director of Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC), received the 2021 Presidents’ Civic Engagement Leadership Award from the Iowa and Minnesota Campus Compact (IAMNCC).

On Tuesday, May 4, 2021, the Iowa Board of Regents awarded Chuck Connerly, Professor and Director of the School of Planning and Public Affairs (SPPA), the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence for his “exceptional contributions and sustained record of excellence."

Faculty member Phuong Nguyen’s recent paper on tax increment financing (TIF) in Iowa has been published on AERA Open.