Center for Policy Design and Governance Leadership and Staff

Saba is founding director of the Center for Policy Design and Governance at the Maxwell School and its affiliated Policy Design Studio, is founding co-director of the Computational Institutional Science Lab, and founding director of the Institutional Grammar Research Initiative. The IGRI is a National Science Foundation-funded network of scholars from around the world who have a shared interest in institutional analysis. Saba is also a senior research associate in the Maxwell School's Center for Policy Research.

Saba joined the Maxwell School in 2017. She is currently the Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy, an associate professor in the Public Administration and International Affairs Department, and director of its acclaimed master of public administration (M.P.A.) program. Her research focuses on policy design, collaborative policymaking, institutional theory and analysis, and regulatory implementation and compliance. She has studied these topics in the contexts of food and environmental policy.

Davor assists the director in the Center for Policy Design and Governance with planning, coordination, implementation and performance tracking of center activities and initiatives. He also schedules and coordinates events and meetings.

Richard Barton ’15 M.A. (PSc) is assistant teaching professor of public administration and international affairs. His research focuses on the American political economy and legislative institutions.

His published articles include “Upending the New Deal Regulatory Regime: Democratic Party Position Change on Financial Regulation” and “A Primary Threat: How Ideological Primary Challengers Exacerbate Polarization in Bill Sponsorship.” He has published op-eds in The Washington Post and CNN, among other outlets.

His research was supported by the Dirksen Congressional Center in 2020. He is a research fellow with the Scholars Strategy Network and the Unite America Institute, where he conducts research and thought leadership on the effects of primaries and alternative electoral institutions on governance.

Barton earned a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2022.

Zach Huitink's research interests focus on areas of national defense, homeland security and veterans’ affairs. Work to date has focused on defense acquisition and contracting practices; public-private partnerships in homeland security and cybersecurity; veterans’ employment, skill building and human capital management; and implementation of organizational change in large public sector enterprises.

Huitink has a successful track record of obtaining extramural funding and working with public, private, nonprofit and university research clients. Huitink has taught master's degree level courses in public administration and national security, and is currently teaching in the ExecutiveMPA@Syracuse program, including coursework on public management and policy topics.

He has extensive training in economics, organization theory, national security and research methodology. He earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Public Administration and International Affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, with concentrations in organization theory, public management and international security. Huitink previously served as the inaugural D'Aniello Family Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University, and an externally-affiliated researcher in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

Tomás Olivier is an assistant professor of public administration and international affairs and senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. He researches the governance of natural resources in the United States and Argentina.

Olivier studies how governments, users and organizations interact and create formal arrangements to sustainably manage water resources. One of his long-standing projects is on the governance of the New York City watersheds, the largest unfiltered drinking water system in the U.S.  

After earning a bachelor's degree in his home country of Argentina, Olivier received a Ph.D. in government and public policy from the University of Arizona in 2017. Prior to joining the Maxwell School, he completed a postdoc at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and worked as an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University for three years.

Michiko Ueda is an associate professor in the Public Administration and International Affairs Department at the Maxwell School and is a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. Her research interests include social determinants of health, suicide prevention, mental health policy, public health, and computational social science.

In her current projects, she examines the psychological conditions of distressed individuals through the analysis of crisis chat service data and social media using natural language processing; studies the consequences and determinants of loneliness and social isolation; investigates the impact of media (both traditional and social media) on suicide deaths and mental health; conducts online randomized controlled trials in diverse cultural settings to promote help-seeking behavior among distressed individuals; explores the effects of COVID-19 and food insecurity on mental health and suicide; measures the implicit level of loneliness in Japan and the United States using the IAT (Implicit Association Test); and examines the well-being of traditionally underrepresented groups in international STEM communities.