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Professor Brian Kovak Named to 2019 Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows


The Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic foundation that has supported the advancement of education and knowledge for more than a century, announced today that Carnegie Mellon University’s Brian K. Kovak has been named to the 2019 Class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. Dr. Kovak, associate professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, is one of 32 distinguished scholars and writers selected from nearly 300 nominations.

"It is an honor to be recognized by the Carnegie Corporation as a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow," Kovak said. "The Carnegie Corporation has a long history of supporting education and scholarship, and I am grateful to be a recipient of a generous grant that will support research on how technological change affects labor markets and how policymakers might respond.”

Now in its fifth year, the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program supports high-caliber scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Each of the 2019 fellowship recipients will receive up to $200,000 to support a research sabbatical that will allow recipients to devote time to studying and writing, addressing pressing issues and cultural transitions affecting individuals in the United States and around the world.

“Andrew Carnegie believed in education and understood its influence on the progress of society and mankind. The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is an integral part of carrying out the mission he set for our organization,” said Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York and president emeritus of Brown University. “We salute this year’s class and all of the applicants for demonstrating the vitality of American higher education and scholarship.”

Dr. Kovak’s proposal focused on emerging technologies and labor market disruptions. The project will develop new tools to identify the workers most likely to be negatively affected by such technologies and will evaluate a promising approach to supporting those workers.

“Brian is a leading scholar and we are thrilled to see him being recognized by the Carnegie Corporation of New York,” said Ramayya Krishnan, dean of Heinz College. “This honor will allow Brian to extend this important research on the future of work, a topic of high priority for Carnegie Mellon." 

Each year, leaders from more than 600 universities, think tanks, publishers, and nonprofit organizations are invited to nominate up to two individuals for the Andrew Carnegie Fellowships. National experts in relevant fields evaluate each nomination. The top proposals are forwarded to the members of a distinguished panel of 16 jurors for review and the final selection of the fellowship class. The jurors choose the fellows based on the quality, originality, and potential impact of their proposals, as well as each scholar’s capacity to communicate the findings to a broad audience.

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About Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College

The Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy is home to two internationally recognized graduate-level institutions at Carnegie Mellon University: the School of Information Systems and Management and the School of Public Policy and Management. This unique colocation combined with its expertise in analytics set Heinz College apart in the areas of cybersecurity, health care, the future of work, smart cities, and arts & entertainment. In 2016, INFORMS named Heinz College the #1 academic program for Analytics Education. For more information, please visit www.heinz.cmu.edu.