From drug recalls to the amount of arsenic allowed in foods, the rules issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have a widespread effect on health and the economy.
How public participation helps shape those rules will be better understood, thanks to a $500,000 grant awarded to political scientist Susan Webb Yackee, the new director at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Yackee will use the Innovation in Regulatory Science Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a foundation that typically sponsors “hard science" research, to study whether public participation during the FDA’s policy decision-making matters to policy outcomes. “The Burroughs Wellcome Fund award will help us all better understand how public input — including that by private-sector researchers who will seek FDA approval for their products — shapes the rules and regulations governing the food we eat and drugs we take,” Yackee says. “It is exciting that the fund values the social science underlying the FDA’s decision-making and wants to know more about the interplay between science and public engagement during policymaking.”
The award is specified for academic investigators who are addressing research questions that will lead to innovation in regulatory science, with ultimate translation of those results into improving the U.S. regulatory policymaking process. These five-year awards support academic researchers developing new methodologies or innovative approaches in regulatory science.
An award-winning expert on policymaking, regulation and public management, Yackee succeeded Thomas DeLeire as the La Follette School’s director. Yackee received the UW–Madison’s 2013 H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, which honors outstanding faculty members for their research contributions. Her research has received four “Emerging Scholar Awards” from the top professional associations in her field. Yackee has also served as a Smith Richardson Domestic Policy Fellow, a UW–Madison Vilas Associate Professor, and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research. She is an associate professor of public affairs and political science.
Her work has been published in such journals as the Journal of Politics, Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory,British Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.