Following her recent appointment as the director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs (IGPA) at the University of Illinois, Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson sat down with the Illinois Newsroom to discuss the position and her vision for the future of the organization. 

Wilson said one of her goals is to recruit more faculty from across the system’s three campuses in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield to look at some of the most difficult issues the state is facing in the areas of fiscal health, education, and substance use disorder, and ask the following questions:

“Can we as a group mete out of our combined research and the perspectives that we have from our research on these problems,” Wilson said, “Can we find that smart policy that can actually help us with these very, very difficult problems?”

Listen to the interview at illinoisnewsroom.org.