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.
The Pulte Platform for Policy at the Keough School
The Pulte Platform for Policy at the Keough School
Professorships at the core
Through its Global Policy Initiative (GPI), the Keough School strives for a high level of integration among the work of academic researchers, policy experts, and practitioners for the purpose of generating new knowledge and eliciting 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 GPI—and extends the global reach of policy solutions centered on the protection of human dignity.
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 PhD 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.
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.
In addition, the Pulte Institute and other units of the Keough School collaborate to advance the Global Policy Initiative 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’s Washington Office, to teach and interact with students, researchers, and other policy experts.
The inaugural senior global policy fellow is Juan Manuel Santos. Santos was the president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018. During his time in office, the historic Colombian Peace Agreement was signed on November 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.
