Mark Alan Hughes

Mark Alan Hughes "is a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Robert A. Fox Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania and a weekly opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. He joined the public policy faculty of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School at the age of 25. Hughes has taught public policy at Penn's Fels Institute, Harvard's Kennedy School, and Swarthmore College; been a senior fellow at Brookings and the Urban Institute; and served as the first Vice President for Policy Development at Public/Private Ventures in Philadelphia. His research has appeared in academic journals of several disciplines such as the Journal of Urban Economics, Political Science Quarterly, Economic Geography, the Journal of the American Planning Association, and Urban Studies. As a policy developer, Hughes helped design and create (1) the $15 million Bridges to Work demonstration for H.U.D., which led to the $750 million Job Access and Reverse Commute federal transportation program; (2) the $35 million Transitional Work Corporation, now the nation's largest publicly financed jobs program under welfare reform and model for a national program under consideration by Congress; and (3) the Campaign for Working Families, which annually returns over $15 million worth of public benefits to over 10,000 eligible households in Philadelphia. His work has been supported by the Ford, Pew, William Penn, MacArthur, Casey, and Rockefeller foundations. Hughes graduated from Swarthmore in 1981 and received the Ph.D. in Regional Science from Penn in 1986, winning the discipline's international Dissertation Prize. He won the National Planning Award in 1992, the youngest recipient ever, for his academic writing that year. The Week magazine named him one of the nation's five best local columnists in 2003. In 2006, he enrolled in the professional Architecture degree program in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania."