Professor Herschel Nachlis, Senior Associate Director and Senior Policy Fellow of the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences at Dartmouth, and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, was recently awarded Dartmouth’s Dean of Faculty Teaching Award. The award is given annually “in recognition of outstanding contributions to Dartmouth and career distinction.”
Since coming to Dartmouth in 2015, Nachlis has regularly offered courses on “Law, Courts, and Judges,” “Introduction to Public Policy,” “Health Politics and Policy,” “Policy Implementation,” and “Inequality and American Democracy,” as well as occasional one-off courses, including a special course and speaker series on “The 2024 Election” jointly with Professors Russ Muirhead and Bill Wohlforth, and Dvora Greenberg Koelling, and a travel course on financial regulation that engaged with experts in Greece, Germany, and Switzerland.
He has co-organized and co-hosted many public events and speaker series about politics, policy, and law, including “The 2024 Election” and “Law and Democracy: The United States at 250,” which have engaged policymakers including Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Vice President Mike Pence, scholars including Jeannie Suk Gersen, Anita Hill, and Keith Whittington, and Dartmouth alumni and trustees including Jake Tapper ’91 and Neal Katyal ’91 in public conversations and classroom visits. In 2024, Nachlis was named Faculty Class Day Speaker by Dartmouth’s graduating Class of 2024.
As a scholar of health politics and policy, regulation, law, and political institutions, Nachlis’s scholarship, public writing, and commentary have appeared in a range of scholarly and public outlets, including JAMA, The Washington Post, and Nature. In 2026-2027 he will serve as Chair of the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Section on Health Politics and Policy (HPP), and in 2025 Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosted an inaugural national research conference Nachlis co-organized on behalf of APSA’s HPP Section. The conference became the subject of a recent Special Issue of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law on “Health Politics and Democracy.”
“The incredible colleagues, institutional support, and students here have made Dartmouth the ideal professional home for me for well over a decade,” Nachlis said. “Dartmouth’s remarkable combination of excellence and rigor with lightheartedness and creativity make being here such an absolute joy and privilege.”
The award will be presented by Interim Dean of Faculty Professor John Carey during Dartmouth’s annual Faculty Recognition Reception.