Angela Hawken is dedicated to interdisciplinary, practitioner-centered partnerships with state and local agencies and nonprofits to implement and test policies, practices, and new technologies.

Working with agencies in over 40 states and 6 countries, her team provides technical assistance on existing and novel implementations and empowers “pracademics,” by ensuring that practitioners play a central role in research, and the software and other technology her team creates centers on their needs. 

At NYU, Hawken directed the interdisciplinary Litmus program, and she is the founding director of BetaGov, a resource center for practitioner-led pragmatic field experiments that provides tools to develop and conduct tests of practices and policies to increase the pace of innovation in criminal justice and other policy areas. While at NYU, she also directed two centers for the US Department of Justice and led the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which partnered with justice agencies in ten states on designing, implementing, and testing responses to the opioid crisis. 

Prior to joining the School of Government and Policy, Hawken was professor of public policy at New York University and director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, associate professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, a research economist at UCLA, and an associate policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. She holds a B.S. and an honors degree in economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School.