Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Director of the National Center for Digital Government
Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Initiative
Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, at Amherst
Jane E. Fountain is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her appointment began in September 2005. Previously, she served for 16 years on the faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Professor Fountain is the founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, based at UMass Amherst, which was established with support from the National Science Foundation to build research and infrastructure for the emerging field of research on technology and governance. The National Center has sponsored research workshops, seminars, doctoral fellowships and visiting researchers from around the world in addition to its active research programs.
Professor Fountain directs the new Science, Technology and Society Initiative , a priority area of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UMass Amherst. The STS Initiative serves as a catalyst for research partnerships between social, natural and physical scientists on campus and beyond. It is also designed to build social science, policy, and cross-disciplinary research on the range of social, political and economic challenges and research questions posed by emerging technologies. As part of the STS Initiative, Fountain is also a Senior Researcher at the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing studying the "Societal Implications of Nanotechnology."
Fountain also directs the Women in the Information Age Project , which was established with a gift from PriceWaterhouseCoopers. This project examines the participation of women in computing and information-technology related fields and, with its partner institutions, seeks to increase the number of women experts in information and communication technologies.
Fountain is the author of Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), which was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title in 2002 by Choice. The book has become a classic text in the field and has been translated into and published in Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese. Fountain was the co-editor of the book, Proposition 2 1/2: Its Impact on Massachusetts.
Her current book projects include the successor volume to Building the Virtual State , which will examine technology-based cross-agency innovations in the U.S. federal government from 2001 to the present, and Women in the Information Age (to be published by Cambridge University Press), which focuses on gender, institutions and technology.
She has published research in scholarly journals including Governance , the National Civic Review, Technology in Society, Science and Public Policy , and The Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Fountain holds a double PhD from Yale University, in organizational behavior and in political science, and masters degrees from Harvard and Yale. While at Yale, she was a Yale Fellow and a Mellon Fellow.
In addition to her scholarly research program, Fountain has served on several governing bodies and advisory boards including the advisory boards for the State of Massachusetts mass.gov web portal, meetup.com, a web-based meeting tool widely used by voters during the last presidential campaign; the Social Science Research Council; and the National Science Foundation. Her executive teaching and invited lectures have taken her to several developing countries and governments in transition including those of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua, Chile, Estonia, Hungary, and Slovenia as well as to industrialized countries including Japan and the countries of the European Union.
- Session: Live debate: the contribution of eGovernment to growth and jobs, 20th September.
