Alumni Breakfast & Roundtable - Public Policy
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Commons, Find the Table with the SIGN! 9 - 10 AM

During Reunions this coming week, we have two alumni, Jim Kahan and Eileen Hlavka, in attendance who have links to the RAND Corporation, and who believe that their Reed education prepared them to be effective advocates for progressive social change as they work on RAND projects.  One of them is currently working on a PhD in public policy in their graduate school and the other retired after 26 years with them.  Both would be delighted to meet with students interested in public policy research and analysis.

Career services will host your breakfast, so please RSVP by Wednesday, June 3rd, 12 PM. Your name will be on the guest list in Commons, so please let them know you are there for the breakfast. Look for Jim and Eileen (with the sign that indicates Alumni/Student Public Policy [RAND] Bfst).

Jim Kahan, '64 Psychology
Consultant, Self-Employed
James Paul Kahan is a consultant living in Portland, Oregon. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematical social psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1968) and a B.A. in psychology from Reed College, Portland Oregon (1964). He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.  He has served on the editorial boards of major professional journals in social psychology and substantive areas such as health and safety.  Jim was named the 2002 Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Psychology of UNC and gave the 2005 Commencement Address at Reed.  He currently serves on the Reed College Alumni Board of Directors and the board of the Alliance Française of Portland. Jim is proficient in French and Dutch.

From 1981 to 2007, Jim was a Senior Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation, including 11 years from 1994 to 2005 as Director of Research at RAND Europe, Leiden the Netherlands.  In 26 years at RAND, Jim participated in and led a variety of projects in the policy areas of safety, environment, science and technology, health, drugs, criminal justice, education, transportation, governance, strategy analysis, military command-and-control, and Army training. He is internationally known for innovations in many methods having to do with individual and group decision making, including seminar gaming, scenario techniques, Delphi techniques, focus groups, and foresight. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles, books, book chapters and RAND monographs.  Jim’s academic career includes 10 years at the University of Southern California in the Department of Psychology and an on-going appointment at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, as well as year-long appointments as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université d’Aix-en-Provence, France; (twice) Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS); and Visiting Professor at the University of Haifa, Israel. He also taught as an adjunct professor at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands; and the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.  In addition to his more academic and policy activities, Jim is a master teacher, choreographer, and performer of international folk dance and music and an amateur thespian.

Eileen Hlavka '04 Interdisciplinary Mathematics-Political Science
Graduate Fellow/Assistant Policy Analyst, RAND Corporation, 2007-current
I am a graduate fellow at the Pardee RAND Graduate School at the RAND Corporation, working on my Ph.D. in public policy analysis; as part of this program, I am also an assistant policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and work on a variety of RAND projects.  My project work has included literature reviews, programming with statistical software packages, interpreting economic model results, helping with survey design, and extending recently developed text analysis methods.  My primary topical interest is climate policy design and I also have done work on health riskiness of chemical exposure, child abuse prevention, and biofuels for electricity production.

In the three years between Reed and RAND, I worked briefly on several political campaigns and then did policy analysis for two years for Prevent Child Abuse California.  I realized that if I wanted to conduct policy research on topics of my choosing, rather than just synthesize others’ research and focus on topics chosen by others, then it would behoove me to earn a graduate degree.  I considered seeking a Ph.D. in economics but ultimately settled on RAND as the best match for my needs and experience.

While at Reed, I learned to juggle; since graduating, I have taken up and become addicted to taiko drumming.