ZU appoints Professor Dr. Steffen Eckhard to the Chair of Public Administration and Public Policy

“ZU is a young and up-and-coming university that stands for the idea of social entrepreneurship like no other educational institution in Germany,” said Eckhard, explaining his motivations for moving to ZU. “I am very excited about the opportunity to be a part of this community to provide students with a scientific approach to analyzing and solving societal challenges.”

“Steffen Eckhard’s teaching and research covers a wide range of topics on public organizations and administrative action in local and international contexts. With his appointment to the Chair of Public Administration and Public Policy, we have succeeded in enriching our political and administrative sciences with excellent and innovative expertise,” said ZU President Professor Dr. Klaus Mühlhahn.

Steffen Eckhard studied political and administrative science at the Universities of Konstanz, Stockholm and Grenoble. After his studies, he worked as a research associate at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin. In his simultaneous doctoral thesis at the University of Konstanz, he dealt with the management of peace missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He then moved to the Chair of Empirical Theories of Politics at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. There he was employed as a scientific coordinator and in the meantime as a substitute professor. His postdoctoral research focused on how international administrations influence policy formulation and implementation in international organizations. Most recently, Steffen Eckhard returned to the University of Konstanz to take up the assistant professorship for Public Administration and Organization Theory. Both in Konstanz and in Munich, he participated in research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.

Since this year, Steffen Eckhard has been leading a new research alliance with the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research and the Kehl University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration on crisis management in municipalities and districts in Germany. Another focus of his work at the Chair of Public Administration and Public Policy at ZU will be the exploration of digital resources as a source of new research data, such as machine learning for automated analysis of texts. In cooperation with the University of Passau and the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz, he is using this methodology in a current research project to investigate spoken administrative language.