Cullen C. Merritt, Ph.D., Founding Director of PROMPT, was appointed in August 2014 as an Assistant Professor in the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). He analyzes the implications of an organization’s degree of publicness on its management strategy and performance. Additionally, he contributes to the public management literature by illuminating the management competencies integral to addressing 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 the American Review of Public Administration, Public Administration, Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, Public Performance & Management Review, Public Personnel Management, and Journal of Public Affairs Education, among other academic outlets. He earned the American Political Science Association’s Paul Volcker Junior Scholar Research Grant Award. He was awarded based on the alignment of his publicness research with the goals of the Volcker 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 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 in his first year of eligibility based on faculty selection and earned O'Neill’s 2018 Favorite Professor of Undergraduate Programs Award 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 faculty advisor for the O'Neill School’s Honors Program, president of the IUPUI Honors College Advisory Council, an advisory board member for the IUPUI Center for Research and Learning, 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.
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.
