Pulte Platform for Policy
Enhancing the Keough School's policy impact.
Established in 2022 by a generous gift from the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation, the Pulte Platform for Policy deepens and expands the policy-relevant research, teaching, scholarship and practice of the Keough School of Global Affairs.
The Pulte Platform is designed to enhance the international impact of the school and its institutes in advancing integral human development, building peace, and alleviating poverty.
Professorships at the Core
The Keough School integrates the work of academic researchers, policy experts, and practitioners to generate new knowledge and elicit practical insights and solutions to the world’s most challenging problems. Accordingly, the gift from the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation makes possible the appointment of three senior professors.
By ensuring the presence of world-class thinkers on the Keough School faculty, the Pulte Platform significantly enhances the scale and scope of the school’s policy impact and extends the global reach of policy solutions centered on the protection of human dignity.
Senior Policy Professorships
Andrés Mejía Acosta
Kuster Family Associate Dean for Policy and Practice
The first of these policy experts is Andrés Mejía Acosta, the Kuster Family Associate Dean for Policy and Practice.
Mejía Acosta’s scholarly work has consistently gained recognition for its policy-relevance. He has been consulted as a thematic or regional expert to international development organizations such as the British Department for International Development, the Carter Center, Freedom House, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Budget Partnership, the Swiss Development Cooperation Agency and UNICEF, among others. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Notre Dame.
The Policy Platform will support two more policy professorships in order to deepen academic expertise and policy relevance in areas that are critical to the Keough School’s strategic plan, such as environmental justice, climate change, poverty and inequality.
The Pulte Institute: a partnership for excellence
The Keough School’s Pulte Institute for Global Development plays an important role in the activities of the Pulte Platform. It does so by leveraging a dedicated staff of experienced international development professionals, administrators and researchers to address global poverty and inequality through policy, practice and partnerships.
Global Policy Fellows
In addition, the Pulte Institute and other units of the Keough School collaborate to advance the school’s policy impact by hosting senior global policy fellows: internationally renowned political, social and economic leaders who will spend time each year on Notre Dame’s campus and in the Keough School Washington Office, to teach and interact with students, researchers and other policy experts.
Juan Manuel Santos
Inaugural Policy Fellow and Former President of Colombia
Juan Manuel Santos was the Keough School’s inaugural policy fellow. Santos was the president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018. During his time in office, the historic Colombian Peace Agreement was signed on Nov. 24, 2016, and is celebrated as a major turning point in ending the country’s 52-year armed conflict.
Santos was the sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for ending the longest armed conflict with the oldest guerrilla in the Western Hemisphere. At the Keough School, Santos taught courses in the Master of Global Affairs and undergraduate programs during the fall 2022 semester.
Maria Ressa
Journalist and Nobel Laureate
Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and Nobel laureate known for her work to defend democracy and combat disinformation, was the school’s second policy fellow.
A former CNN bureau chief and correspondent in Jakarta and Manila, Ressa co-founded the Philippines-based news site Rappler in 2012 with three other women. The company earned recognition for fighting fake news and spotlighting human rights abuses by the regime of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte. In 2021, she was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. Ressa joined the Keough School in March 2024 to serve as the keynote speaker at a conference in Washington, D.C. that explored how to leverage new deliberative technologies to defend democracy.