Professor Robert D. Putnam, Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Harvard University

Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses.  He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. 

Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  

He is the founder of The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, a program that has brought together leading practitioners and thinkers for a multi-year discussion to develop  actionable ideas to fortify our nation's civic connectedness. 

He has written a dozen books, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness.

He is now conducting research on the challenges of building community in an increasingly diverse society.