Suzanne J. Piotrowski

Suzanne J Piotrowski

Degree: 1998, MPA

Job Title: Professor and Director at the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University

Dr. Suzanne J. Piotrowski is a professor of public affairs and administration at Rutgers University–Newark, director of the Transparency and Governance Center (TGC), and co-director of the School of Public Affairs and Administration’s Master of Public Administration (MPA) program. She researches freedom of information, transparency, and open government issues, with a strong focus on connecting with communities of practice. In 2020, she became a co-principal investigator on a $2.3 million Smart and Connected Cities National Science Foundation Grant to make public services more equitable and efficient in Newark, New Jersey.

Dr. Piotrowski graduated from the University of Delaware’s MPA Program in 1998. During her first year as an MPA student, she worked at the Institute for Public Administration and later completed a summer internship at the Delaware Department of Finance. Dr. Piotrowski credits the support of the faculty for helping her internship turn into a year-long assistantship. Thanks to the faculty's mentorship and the knowledge gained through her classes, Dr.  Piotrowski’s first job after graduate school was for a public finance consulting firm. There, she applied the research skills learned from the MPA program and used them in that role, leading to her first publication in a peer-reviewed journal article.

In 2018, Dr. Piotrowski was appointed by the Archivist of the United States to serve on the Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee for a two-year term. She served as the independent assessor of the U.S. national action plan for the Open Government Partnership. She also served as the conference chair and founder of the 1st Global Conference on Transparency Research (Rutgers University–Newark, May 2011). Dr. Piotrowski has consulted with the World Bank Institute on an evaluation of Thailand’s Official Information Act and with the Carter Center on a project assessing how access to information differentially affects women.

Previously, she was deputy dean and chair of faculty development for the School of Public Affairs and Administration, and during the 2009–2010 academic year, she was a faculty fellow in the Office of the Chancellor at Rutgers University–Newark. While on research leave in 2017, she was an honorary research associate in the Department of Politics at University College London. She is a past chair of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) Section on Ethics and Integrity of Governance. 

Dr. Piotrowski writes widely on public management, accountability, and transparency issues and publishes extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. She authored the book Governmental Transparency in the Path of Administrative Reform (State University of New York Press, 2007). In 2010, Lexington Books published Dr. Piotrowski’s edited volume Governmental Transparency and Secrecy: Linking Literature and Contemporary Debate. In 2022, her coauthored project The Power of Partnership in Open Government? Multistakeholder Governance Reform and the Open Government Partnership (MIT Press’ Information Policy Series), received the 2024 Best Book Award from ASPA’s Section of Public Administration Research.