Top of Mind: Anand Desai

Published Date September 09, 2025
News Type Public Address

Faculty Emeritus Anand Desai, foreground, has fond memories of Glenn College events like this 2014 dinner, served annually by faculty to welcome incoming graduate students.

By Joan Slattery Wall

Before graduate studies at the Glenn College, Yushim Kim’s education had been largely theoretical, confined to textbook learning without practical application.

“A pivotal moment came when Professor Anand Desai listened to my academic discourse and remarked, ‘That’s what you understand, not what you know,’” said Kim, now an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. “This distinction became fundamental to my intellectual development, helping me recognize the crucial difference between conceptual understanding and experiential knowledge.”

That differentiation, said Desai, now a Faculty Emeritus of the college, created opportunities so he and his students could work with practitioners and meet the land-grant promises of Ohio State.

“I think this role of the university, 2 miles up from the state capital, is that we should contribute to the work of the legislature and the administration,” Desai said. 

Public administration exists primarily to serve the public.

Anand Desai, Faculty Emeritus
John Glenn College of Public Affairs

Desai, who joined Ohio State in 1985 and retired in 2019, now works as a Senior Fellow with the Academic and Government Consulting Group at Clarivate, which provides data, insights and analytics; workflow solutions; and expert services in the areas of academia and government, intellectual property, and life sciences and healthcare.

“When I remember Anand, I think about how he started every email with his signature salutation: Dear Gentlefolk,” said Lisa Frericks, the college director of advancement and strategic engagement. “Just thinking of that makes me smile.”

He was interim director of the School of Public Policy and Management in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences when it merged with the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy to become the freestanding John Glenn School of Public Affairs in 2006. Professor Emeritus Larry Libby was director of the institute at the time.

Extolling Glenn College Educators

In the first of our new “Top of Mind” features, we shared the esteemed federal public service and career of Faculty Emeritus Doug Jones. Since then, we’ve highlighted of Professor Ned Hill and Professor Caroline Wagner, also now Faculty Emeriti, upon their recent retirements.

“Larry and I went to the Faculty Council of the University Senate and met with all the deans to make an academic case for why a land grant university of the stature of Ohio State should have a free-standing public policy school. That is how a school consisting of a motley crew of nine faculty (smaller than most departments at Ohio State) and a declining student body became a free-standing school with the backing of the president, the provost, Senator Glenn, students and alumni,” he said. “I happened to be in the middle of those things.”

While he was on loan to the National Science Foundation from 2015 to 2019 during his professorship at the Glenn College, he was successful in establishing a policy evaluation unit.

“It became a permanent part of the NSF, and now it is thriving on the same level that the Glenn College is thriving,” he said.

When he was a member of the executive council and the Commission on Peer Review and Accreditation of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration, he worked to establish a simulation type of competition between business and public policy college students.

“I managed to get some money to set up this collaborative activity to engage students in something not traditionally taught in schools of public affairs. Getting this to be used as an analytical tool in addition to statistics was a breakthrough in schools of public affairs, and that competition still thrives,” he said. “I managed to be there when these things happened and pulled together people working in the field.”

Understanding the Complexity of Public Policy

In fact, in his research he almost always collaborates with people.

“I rarely did any research on my own,” he said. “I would like to think that is because I dealt with problems that any individual could not address on his or her own. Policy problems are always complex.

“I would flit from education to health care to energy to economic development, depending on the kinds of problems I got to work on from the state,” he said.

Professor Anand Desai, center, and Associate Professor Jeffrey Bielicki, right, talk to a student at a 2014 graduate student event.

Because of that complexity, he said, there often are no permanent solutions in public policy.

“You address problems, and tomorrow those will morph into something different,” he said.

He gives the example of the welfare of older adults. In the early part of the last century, it was perceived to be an economic problem, so the Social Security Act was passed in 1935. In 1965, it was seen as a health care problem, so Medicare was created. In 2006, the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit was initiated to address both economic and health care issues.

“The problem doesn’t disappear,” Desai said. “The welfare of the elderly, health care and education are perennial problems. Every time a policymaker comes along, he or she will see it as a problem in a certain way and frame policy that way, so it will be a partial solution to a very messy problem.”

What Messy Problems Is He Examining Now?

Desai still collaborates with researchers at the Glenn College.

Currently, in a project led by Clarivate, Desai and Professor Joshua Hawley, director of the Ohio Education Research Center, are exploring the development of a National Secure Data Service framework to enable the federal policy community to use data efficiently and effectively for informed, evidence-based decisions. The effort is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

In 2023, he joined lecturer Lisa Gajary and other colleagues to publish “Convergence Research as a ‘System-of-Systems’: A Framework and Research Agenda” in Minerva, A Review of Science, Learning and Policy.

At Clarivate, his responsibilities include developing and delivering a strategic approach to policy and assessment for the scientific research, development and innovation enterprise.

One of Desai’s fascinations is determining how to evaluate faculty in higher education and assess how science contributes to society, the research field and the researchers.

“The university has labs, spends money on research and gives young faculty money to get research started. It invests in infrastructure and salaries. How is the university to assess the value of that to itself and to the legislature? It’s about evaluation. Because I have access to all these data, I can do all these things,” Desai said.

That’s what excites me, is mucking around in the data.

Anand Desai, Faculty Emeritus
John Glenn College of Public Affairs

That’s what he helped students do during his tenure at Ohio State.

He taught basic statistics to master’s students who often had bad experiences with the topic in undergraduate studies or who had never taken a statistics course.

“There are two types of people who come to statistics: those who hate it and those who will tolerate it. I enjoyed getting people to see its value and understand how it’s used and how they are pretty good at it, regardless of their experience in undergrad,” he said.

In his Logic of Inquiry class, he talked to students about different ways to understand the world around them.

 

Anand Desai, second from left, engages with graduate students in a class in 2006.

“At the doctorate level, it’s more about engaging the students than it is teaching them. From my perspective, a doctoral program’s primary objective is to teach people to do research. If you don’t continue to do that after getting your PhD, you don’t learn anything new,” he said. “If you don’t learn how to learn, you don’t remember what you did in graduate school and grow any further. It’s an important skill.”

He still keeps in touch with students, who are always interested in remembering their time at Ohio State. In fact, he most enjoyed hanging out with students during his time at the Glenn College.

“Regardless of what age I was or am, the current students are always the same age,” Desai said, “so in some ways that keeps you both young and on your toes.”

Students and colleagues recall Desai’s influence on their work.

Glenn College Professor Joshua Hawley, director of the Ohio Education Research Center, is a longtime research collaborator with Desai.

I first met Anand when I was asked to give a presentation at the then-John Glenn School of Public Affairs in maybe 2010. He made an offhand comment about “using simulation” to understand workforce outcomes.

It struck me as insightful as I was mostly focused on econometric methods, and I was very frustrated with limitations on what I could tell policymakers using post-hoc analysis. I had only previously used forecasting methods in financial projections for World Bank projects. It was a new idea to me that there were operations research methods that would allow me to model agents behavior in the workforce. This one comment led to work that continues to this day!

Anand brought me over to work on a major National Institutes of Health project with him and Kathy Sullivan, former director of the Battelle Center for Science, Engineering and Public Policy. That ended up being 10 years of effort and a change in my Ohio State faculty position from the College of Education and Human Ecology to the Glenn College! We are currently partnering on a project with the National Science Foundation on imagining a data service for the National Secure Data Service. Anand is a valuable colleague, and his commitment to students and fellow faculty has made my career and life better.

Yushim Kim, PhD 2006, is an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University.

During my doctoral studies, I was always amazed by Professor Desai’s office. Despite being filled with countless books, files and documents that seemed to occupy every available space, Professor Desai could locate any needed material with remarkable efficiency. While I often stood bewildered by the apparent chaos, he would navigate the space with purpose and precision. Though his organizational system remains a mystery to me to this day, his advice brought remarkable clarity to a graduate student whose mind was initially as cluttered as his office.

Like his ability to find order in his chaotic office, he had an uncanny talent for distilling complex ideas into crystalline insights. Over time, I learned to differentiate between encountering a concept, comprehending its theoretical meaning and truly knowing it through practical application.

Professor Desai’s Logic of Inquiry course deeply influenced my academic development. Rather than merely teaching specific research methods, the course challenged me to contemplate the deeper philosophical implications of social science research. More broadly, my current academic practices and research approaches were profoundly shaped during my graduate studies under his mentorship. Only in retrospect have I fully appreciated the impact of having such a wise and compassionate advisor during those formative years. Now, as I mentor my own students, I strive to emulate not just his wisdom but his ability to transform confusion into clarity — a skill he demonstrated daily, whether navigating his labyrinthine office or illuminating the path from understanding to knowing.

Ketra Rice, who received her PhD in public policy from the Glenn College in 2012, is an economist in the Division of Injury Prevention at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Anand was a true champion for my success and was really cutting edge in introducing me to simulation modeling methods, particularly agent-based modeling. It is really comical now to think about how I was really not interested in this method at all at the beginning of my tenure in the program.

I came from the agricultural economics department, so I was pretty sure of only using econometric methods in my dissertation, but having Anand as my advisor changed all of that. (If you know him, you would know he really doesn’t speak too kindly of economic theory.) Anand was persistent with me in applying this method, and I thank him for it because it is honestly one of my strongest methodological tools and has really helped me advance in my research at CDC.

Anand has continued to be supportive post-graduation and continues to offer opportunities for me to write and stay connected through professional networks. 

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.