Jane Fountain

Jane Fountain is a professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is also founder and director of the National Center for Digital Government and Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Initiative and the Center for Public Policy and Administration. Her research is focused at the intersection of institutions, global information and communication technologies, and governance.

Fountain is the author of Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), which was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title 2002 by Choice, and has been translated into and published in Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese. Her current book project, Women in the Information Age (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), focuses on gender, institutions and technology. She has published research on information and communication technology and the development of networked forms of organization and governance in Governance, Technology in Society, Science and Public Policy, The Communications of the ACM, and other scholarly journals. Fountain has served on several governing bodies convened to foster research on information and communication technologies and governance. She holds a double Ph.D. from Yale University, in organizational behavior and in political science.