Barry Bluestone

Barry Bluestone is the Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy, the founding Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and the founding Dean of the School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Before assuming these posts, Bluestone spent 12 years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston as the Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy and as a Senior Fellow at the University’s John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. He was the Founding Director of UMass Boston’s Ph.D. Program in Public Policy. Before coming to UMass in the Fall of 1986, he taught economics at Boston College for 15 years and was Director of the University’s Social Welfare Research Institute. Professor Bluestone was raised in Detroit, Michigan and attended the University of Michigan where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1974. He currently serves as Chair of the Staying Power Task Force, a task force developed to promote manufacturing in Massachusetts, is a member of the Advisory Committee to the Boston Civic Engagement Summit, and co-chairs the Municipal Leadership Academy, a joint program of the School and the Massachusetts Municipal Association. He is also a member of the Community Affairs Research Advisory Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and serves on the Executive Board of the Boston chapter of the American Jewish Committee. He is a past board member of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT). In his spare time, when he was younger, he used to compete in team triathlons as a bicycle racer — fortunately with a team otherwise comprised of orthopedic surgeons and an internist. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Mary Ellen Colten and their teenage son Joshua.