Mary Sprague

Mary Sprague is an affiliated scholar with the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.  She specializes in program evaluation and policy design. Dr. Sprague’s current research focuses on government grant design, local capacity bias in grantsmanship, and student assessment.  Her work has appeared in various publications, including American Review of Public Administration, Political Research Quarterly, and Journal of Public Affairs Education.

Previously, Dr. Sprague was a senior researcher at the Bill Lane Center and a research scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.  For the Stanford Public Policy Program, she was a senior lecturer and directed both its undergraduate practicum program and city manager initiative.  Dr. Sprague also worked for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and the Public Policy Institute of California.  She received her BA in public policy from Stanford University and her Master of Public Policy and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.