Ryan Smith

As Innovation Team Project Manager for the City of Durham, Ryan is part of an exciting new effort, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, to reduce high poverty levels, lower violent crime rates, and increase economic opportunity for justice-involved persons in the city. The team’s mission is to increase Durham’s capacity to address major policy challenges, experiment and take risks, apply insights from behavioral economics, make data-driven decisions, and engage residents in identifying and prototyping solutions through human-centered design. Before joining the city, Ryan served as Special Assistant to the Dean and Senior Director of Innovation for the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. In this capacity, he partnered with the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke and the Lab at OPM to create two new government innovation programs - Behavioral Economics in Local Government and Innovation in Government by Design.

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