Miriam Jorgensen
Associate Director for Research, Native Nations Institute

Miriam Jorgensen is Associate Director for Research for the Native Nations Institute for Research, Management, and Policy (NNI) at the University of Arizona and Research Director at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. During the past fifteen years, she has worked primarily on issues of governance and economic development in Indian Country, with a particular concentration on the ways individual tribes’ social and cultural characteristics affect development.

Jorgensen has studied and written about a variety of related public policy topics, including welfare reform, Native constitutional reform, tribal policing and justice systems, Indian housing, and tribal gaming and forestry enterprises. Increasingly, this work also has addressed the problems and concerns of First Nations in Canada.

Jorgensen has been a visiting scholar at the Washington University School of Law and the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, has served as an instructor in economics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard School of Public Health, and is a former member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers. She received her B.A. in economics from Swarthmore College (1987), B.A. and M.A. in human sciences from the University of Oxford (1989, 1995), M.P.P. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1991), and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2000).