Mark H. Moore is the Research Professor of Public Management. His current primary focus is studying the processes that enable social innovation and change to occur in response to changing political, economic, and social conditions.
He began his career at the Kennedy School as a member of the inaugural class of the masters program in public policy, and was subsequently awarded one of Harvard’s first PhDs in public policy. After being appointed assistant professor in 1974, Moore took leave to serve for two years as the chief planning officer at the newly created Drug Enforcement Agency. In 1978, he was appointed the first Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and used that position to launch the Kennedy School’s Criminal Justice Program. At that time, he was also asked to lead the Kennedy School’s “strategic management cluster,” which was tasked with developing a distinctive approach to public management that could integrate the school’s interests in policy analysis and improving government policy-making processes with the more traditional concerns of public administration. He was also appointed to chair the newly created Faculty Committee on Executive Programs through which the concepts being developed could be tested for utility and value with practicing public executives.