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Education

Harvard University, AB 1991, AM 1992
University of Innsbruck, PhD 1994
Yale Law School, JD 1997

Bio

Professor Noveck directs The Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance. The author of Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World (Yale Press 2021), named a Best Book of 2021 by Stanford Social Innovation Review, she is  a member or the faculty at Northeastern’s Institute for Experiential AI (IEAI). New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first chief innovation officer and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. Professor Noveck is also visiting senior faculty fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and a fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

Previously, Professor Noveck served in the White House as the first United States deputy chief technology officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative under President Obama. Former UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government.

At the GovLab, Professor Noveck directs better governance programs, including work with public institutions on public engagement in lawmaking (CrowdLaw), sources experts to find innovative solutions to hard problems (Smarter Crowdsourcing) and works with citizens and cities to co-create solutions to public problems (City Challenges). She also coaches public problem solvers, working with passionate individuals to take their public interest projects from idea to implementation.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, Professor Noveck is a member of the Scholars Council of the Library of Congress and the EPSRC Centre for the Mathematics of Precision Healthcare. She also serves on the International Advisory Board of the NHS Digital Academy and the Yankelovich Democracy Monitor and as a member of the Inter-American Development Bank, the President’s Commission on Transparency and Corruption and the Global Future Council on Technology, Values and Policy for the World Economic Forum. She is an executive member of the steering committee for the Collective Intelligence Conferences and GIGAPP (Grupo de Investigación en Gobierno, Administracion y Politicas Publicas) and a visiting researcher at Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology Center for Radical Transformation. She is co-editor of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Digital Government Research and Practice journal and a founding associate editor of the Journal of Collective Intelligence.

In 2018, Professor Noveck was awarded a Robert Schumann Fellowship at the European University Institute and a Richard von Weizsaecker Fellowship by the Robert Bosch Foundation. She was named one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government 2018 by Apolitical. Previously, she was selected as one of the Foreign Policy 100 by Foreign Policy as well as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and Top Women in Technology by Huffington Post.

In addition to Solving Public Problems, Professor Noveck is the author of Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing (Harvard University Press 2015) and Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings 2009) and co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press, 2005). She also delivered a TED talk, “Demanding a More Open-Source Government.” She tweets @bethnoveck. 

Fields of Expertise

  • Law and Society
  • Law and Technology
  • Public Interest Advocacy
  • Social Justice

Selected Works

Beth Simone Noveck

Professor and Director, The Burnes Center for Social Change

Contact

Email
b.noveck@northeastern.edu
Google Scholar Page @bethnoveck