Suzanne J. Piotrowski, PhD (Bio)

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 Director of SPAA’s MPA programs. Dr. Piotrowski writes widely on public management, transparency, and open government issues and publishes extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. Her 2022 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 the American Society of Public Administration’s Section of Public Administration Research. In 2010, Lexington Books published Dr. Piotrowski’s edited volume Governmental Transparency and Secrecy: Linking Literature and Contemporary Debate. She also authored the book Governmental Transparency in the Path of Administrative Reform (State University of New York Press, 2007).

In 2025, she was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and was awarded the Academic of the Year Award by the New Jersey Section of the American Society for Public Administration. She served on the inaugural U.S. Open Government Federal Advisory Committee from 2024-2025. 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 the City of Newark, NJ. 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 United States national action plan for the Open Government Partnership. She is founder of the Global Conference on Transparency Research and hosted the first conference at Rutgers University–Newark in May 2011. She is a past chair of the American Society for Public Administration’s Section on Ethics and Integrity of Governance. She has an MPA from the University of Delaware and a PhD in political science from American University.

She developed and teaches an MPA-level class titled Unlocking Open Government.