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The American University School of Public Affairs is thrilled to announce that Professor Anna Amirkhanyan has won the 2023 Duncombe Excellence in Doctoral Education Award. This distinction, established in 2014 by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) in honor of the late Professor William Duncombe, recognizes a faculty member who makes an exceptional effort over time to support the education of PhD students in the field of public administration and policy. 

Amirkhanyan accepted the honor at October’s NASPAA 2023 Conference. SPA Distinguished Scholar in Residence Ken Meier, who won the award in 2019, nominated Amirkhanyan, who served as coordinator of the SPA doctoral program for six years. Her recognition makes AU the first institution to boast two active Duncombe Award winners.

“Professor Amirkhanyan has consistently demonstrated her ability to mentor and educate doctoral students in public affairs . . . while maintaining a heavy administrative load as department chair, director of the PhD program, and director of the MPA program,” said Meier in his nomination letter. “In this process, she shows a concern for both the intellectual development of students and a recognition of the challenges that doctoral students face.”

“I'm honored to be recognized for this service,” said Amirkhanyan. “A PhD program is not something that is administered by one person––it is the job of everyone in the department. SPA, with its amazing leadership, faculty, staff and students, makes it easier. The coordinator’s task is simply to select, among the many applicants, those who are committed to rigorous research on public organizations and public policies, and make sure that they have lasting mentoring relationships with the faculty in the department.”

Innovation in Doctoral Education

Along with recruitment and admissions, academic advising, providing administrative oversight, and acting as liaison between faculty and students, Amirkhanyan’s tenure as director included several new practical and programming efforts. She encouraged student productivity and progress with professional development seminars focusing on a range of doctoral education milestones. Under Amirkhanyan’s purview, the degree program expanded its focus from public administration to public administration and policy. Two separate tracks were created, with new courses, new comprehensive examinations, and new program requirements. More recently, new PhD Coordinator Professor Seth Gershenson further amended the comprehensive and qualifier exams in line with the demands of the competitive landscape of doctoral education.

Amirkhanyan insists on sharing credit for the award with the wider faculty as well as SPA’s proactive approach to doctoral education. The school provides full tuition assistance and a graduate stipend to all of its PhD students and works to remain alert to the evolving needs of contemporary students. 

“We innovate,” said Amirkhanyan. “We constantly ask how to do things better in order to enable our students to prioritize and produce original research, so that by the time they're on the market, they are fully socialized, seasoned scientists.” 

“Each PhD student is unique,” added Meier. “It's what we call in the business a ‘small batch’ or ‘unit production’: one at a time. . . It is the one-on-one work that really matters. You have to treat them as individuals while providing lots of feedback and challenge in the process, so that they get better.”

SPA’s reputation for quality helps with recruitment and retention: the doctoral program currently has 25 students in all, and they admit between five and nine students each fall. 

“I think we're attractive for students who want to be in the nation's capital, and who are interested in the topics that we study: organizational management, organizational performance, public/private partnerships, nonprofits studies, education policy, health policy, social welfare policy, environmental policy, and many others” said Amirkhanyan.

Dedicated Mentorship

Research across disciplines has repeatedly borne out the in academic settings, including improved rates of retention, degree completion, and post-graduate success. Beyond directing the PhD program, Amirkhanyan has also logged hundreds of hours of one-on-one mentoring during her career, with 18 official advisees and hundreds of unofficial ones. 

“As a former Duncombe Award winner and someone with a great deal of experience with doctoral education over four decades, I can honestly say that I have learned a lot from [Anna],” said Meier. “She interacts with students better than I do and has a critical eye that catches potential problems early in the process and, thus, saves both the student and the dissertation committee much time and frustration.”

Amirkhanyan’s nomination for the award included eight letters of support from former or current PhD students. Many spoke of Anna’s appreciation for work/life balance and the human element of scholarly development. She organized discussion sessions on the topic and encouraged students who struggled to reconcile dissertation completion with the competing demands of parenthood and professional and military service.  

“She was the first person who really made me feel like having both a career and personal relationships, especially familial relationships, was possible,” said one student. 

She also engages individual students in hands-on research opportunities through coauthorship. Nearly half of Amirkhanyan’s publications were written with 15 PhD student co-authors, published in top-ranking journals.

“Several papers on her vita are under review or in progress that are also coauthored with several different PhD students,” reads the nomination letter. “[T]his volume indicates that coauthorship is not a sporadic thing with Anna, but rather a consistent part of her approach to graduate education.”

Other students endorsed Amirkhanyan’s generosity, consistent quality feedback, and open-door policy; another celebrated her willingness to leave space for him to develop his own ideas. One shared that Amirkhanyan created a mini course on qualitative research to help her incorporate field work into her dissertation. 

“Others, both male and female students, see Anna Amirkhanyan as a role model, an example of a first-rate scholar who is willing to invest time in students and provide the tools that they need to succeed,” said Meier in the nomination letter.

Amirkhanyan offers credit to her own series of mentors, from her doctoral experience at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs: Douglas Wolf, Stuart Bretschneider, Alasdair Roberts, Rosemary O'Leary, Patricia Ingraham, and Bill Duncombe himself, in the Center for Policy Research.

“I worked with several professors who taught me what it means to do research,” she recalled. “They taught me how to work with and respect doctoral students, give them space to choose projects to work on, educate them and provide them with tools, and empower them while providing honest feedback on their work.”

Each generation continues this cycle of careful academic mentorship. Amirkhanyan’s advisees have gone on to join the faculties at Ohio State University, Albany University (SUNY), University of North Carolina-Charlotte, Evergreen State University, North Carolina State University, Winthrop University, and the Uniformed Services University, among others; others have entered practice in government or nonprofits. 

Meier, who says he joined the faculty at American University in part because of its distinct commitment to doctoral education, appreciates SPA’s mentoring philosophy. With its unprecedented concentration of active Duncombe Award winners, SPA can argue for the unique advantage of AU public affairs education.

“We have a very hands-on PhD program,” said Meier, “where students work in sort of a one-on-one, very intensive apprenticeship program, with a couple of faculty members who monitor their development and try to create them as independent scholars. Anna is spectacular in that job, in terms of dealing with both the academic and the personal side of her students and going out of her way to make opportunities that challenge them as scholars or teachers.”

“What comes through is they all feel that they were treated as valued individuals by her. She had their best interests in mind and went out of her way to help them.”