Neil Kleiman

Neil Kleiman has spent 25 years building a career at the intersection of policy, philanthropy, government, and academia. He founded an urban issues think tank, established new university degree programs, and developed innovative and practical policy solutions for dozens of cities across the United States. He has also written and edited over thirty policy reports, with his work featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio.

Kleiman is an urban policy professor at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and is a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change and the GovLab. He also holds an appointment at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. He teaches courses on policy formation, urban innovation, and new approaches to managing technology and big data. In 2017, he published A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative and Distributed Governance on Brookings Institution Press. He is the research director of the Mayors Leadership Institute on Smart Cities, a partnership effort with the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

With partners at the NYU School of Medicine, he helped build cityhealthdashboard.com; one of the only consistently updated dashboards tracking local level health and public health data for over 900 cities nationwide. In 2022, he published one of the first-ever assessments of public sector organizational culture in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Kennedy School at Harvard. At Tulane University, Kleiman developed a new Master of Public Administration program that launched in 2020.

Kleiman was previously Director of Policy at Living Cities, a collaborative of the world’s largest foundations and corporate philanthropies. He began his career as the founding director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-based policy think tank.