David Ammons Selected for 2019 Paul Posner Pracademic Award

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Faculty member David N. Ammons has been selected as the winner of the 2019 Association for Budgeting and Financial Management Paul Posner Pracademic Award. This award recognizes the important contributions that recipients have made to their field as both practitioners and academics. David received the award this past September at a conference in Washington, D.C. He is only the second recipient of this award.

Named for Paul Posner, the ultimate pracademic (academic-practitioner), the award honors Ammons’s lifetime of contributions to the field of budgeting and financial management. His thought leadership and expertise are widely lauded in the field of public administration research. A 2018 article in Public Administration Review cites Ammons as one of five scholars “at the forefront of the use of mixed methods” in public administration research for work they did in the 1980s combining quantitative and qualitative evidence in their studies. The article, written by Kathryn Hendren, Qian Eric Luo, and Sanjay K. Pandey of George Washington University, is based on a study of the research published in the top six journals of public policy and public administration since 1980.

Since earning his PhD from the University of Oklahoma in 1983, Ammons taught for over three decades on performance measurement, benchmarking, and productivity improvement in local government. He joined the School of Government in 1996 and served as director of the MPA program from 2001 to 2006.

In addition to his teaching, Ammons has also written nine books on local government management including the forthcoming Performance Measurement for Managing Local Government: Getting It Right [MSM1] (Melvin & Leigh, September 2019) and Municipal Benchmarks: Assessing Local Performance and Establishing Community Standards (M.E. Sharpe/Routledge, 2012). His articles have appeared in multiple publications including Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration, American Review of Public Administration, and others. Currently, Ammons serves on the NC Governor’s Advisory Committee on Performance Management. He was elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2006 and in 2014 was the recipient of the Joseph Wholey Distinguished Scholarship Award presented by ASPA's Center for Performance and Accountability for work in the field of public sector performance.

For more on the Paul Posner Award, visit the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management.