Biography
Dana A. Dolan is a policy fellow and adjunct faculty member at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she teaches graduate courses on the policy process to Mason’s public administration, public policy, and philosophy students who concentrate in ethics and public affairs.
Dolan is also a professorial lecturer in international affairs at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs where she teaches graduate courses in qualitative methods. In her teaching, she draws on both her academic research and her prior experience as a consultant to numerous government agencies (e.g., USPS OIG, IRS, NRC) and in senior positions at a not-for-profit association of major government consulting firms and government clients (e.g., Software Productivity Consortium, Telework Consortium, State IT Consortium).
Her research interests center on long-term governance issues and the politics of policy-making, which she applies to complex global issues such as climate adaptation, resilience, and human migration. Her theoretically rich work has been published in top tier journals such as Policy Studies Journal and Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment.
Dolan is currently completing a book manuscript that revises and updates her Schar School dissertation, which was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation and a competitive award from the provost’s office and was nominated for the Schar School’s “Best Dissertation” award in 2017.
Her conceptual work has been recognized by MSF scholars with an invitation to write a chapter for an edited volume, “The Modern Guide to the Multiple Streams Framework” (Zahariadis, Herweg, Zohlnhöfer, and Petridou, eds. Publication target: 2023) and by crisis management scholars with an invitation to speak at the international conference, “After the Deluge: How to Update our Institutions for Creeping Crises.”
In addition to her doctoral degree in public policy, Dolan holds a master’s degree in information systems from Mason and a bachelor’s joint degree in mathematics and business from Wake Forest University, where she graduated cum laude.