Scott W. Allard is an associate professor in the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration with expertise in the areas of social welfare policy and poverty. His primary research interests are in residential mobility, spatial mismatch in labor markets, spatial variation in the delivery of social welfare programs, and the role of nonprofit organizations in the safety net.

To better understand the contours of social service provision in the U.S., Professor Allard recently completed two surveys of more than 2,000 governmental and nonprofit social service providers in seven urban and rural communities. Allard has received research grants supporting his work on social welfare policy from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), The Brookings Institution, the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research (UKCPR), and the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI). His book entitled, Out of Reach: Place, Poverty, and the New American Welfare State (Yale University Press, 2009), explores the accessibility and stability of social service agencies serving low-income populations in urban America. In addition, he has published several articles on the geography of contemporary social welfare policy, residential mobility and spatial mismatches in urban labor markets, and on social service delivery in the post-welfare reform era that have appeared in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Housing Policy Debate, Policy Studies Journal, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and Urban Affairs Review.

Professor Allard is a faculty research associate at the University of Chicago’s Population Research Center, and a faculty research affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. Prior to his faculty position at the University of Chicago, Professor Allard was an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and an assistant professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Brown University. Professor Allard has been a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Urban Scholar, as well as a visiting scholar at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.

Social Policy, Innovation, Thought Leaders, Think Tanks, Brookings Institute, influential, Policy, Public Policy,