Cullen C. Merritt, Ph.D., founding director of PROMPT, is an associate professor and director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). He studies the implications of an organization’s publicness on its management strategy and performance. Additionally, he illuminates the management competencies integral to addressing complex public service challenges and the strategies that enable organizations to develop these competencies. His research, teaching, and service are motivated by the same desire to improve governance and empower managers to address public problems through innovative organizational design.
Dr. Merritt's research appears in Public Administration Review, TheAmerican Review of Public Administration, Public Administration, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, Public Performance & Management Review, Public Personnel Management, and Punishment & Society, among other academic outlets. He earned the 2014 American Political Science Association’s Paul Volcker Award based on the alignment of his publicness research with the goals of this award, specifically its “potential to shed light on important public administration questions,” “scholarly and methodological rigor,” and “promise for advancing practice and theory development.”
As a teacher, Dr. Merritt educates current and aspiring government and nonprofit employees on the strategies and competencies needed to lead their organizations to address public problems. He has formally advised or actively mentored over 20 students on peer-reviewed research, dissertations, and honors projects. For his teaching excellence, he was O'Neill’s sole recipient of the 2018 Indiana University Trustees’ Teaching Award based on faculty selection and earned O'Neill’s Favorite Professor of Undergraduate Programs Awards in 2018 and 2020 based on student nominations. Additionally, he was recognized as an IUPUI Athletics Favorite Professor in 2015, 2019, and 2020.
Dr. Merritt has applied his scholarly expertise to make service-related contributions to the O'Neill School, IUPUI, the public administration discipline, and the community. Most recently, he has served as president of the IUPUI Honors College Advisory Council, an advisory board member for the IUPUI Center for Research and Learning, member of the Public Personnel Management editorial board, member of the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) Undergraduate Education Committee, and co-principal investigator of a contract with the City-County Council of Indianapolis and Marion County to evaluate its effectiveness as a governing body. For his service, he received the 2019 Advocate of the Dream Award from the IUPUI Black Student Union (BSU) for using his professional role on and off campus to serve students and members of the BSU.
A native of Lubbock, Texas, Dr. Merritt earned his Ph.D. in Public Administration and Master of Public Administration from the University of Kansas and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Texas A&M University.
