Rockefeller Center Directors

Andrew A. Samwick (2005 – 2019)

Dartmouth College Professor of Economics Andrew Samwick began his tenure as Director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and the Social Sciences on July 1, 2004. Samwick attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics. He received his doctoral training in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in public economics and finance. He joined the faculty of Dartmouth in 1994 and is most widely known for his work on the economics of retirement. He is the co-author of a set of reform proposals that restore solvency to the Social Security system through the addition of investment-based, personal retirement accounts. He has testified three times before Congressional committees on his research. In July 2003, Samwick joined the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, serving for a year as its chief economist and helping to direct the work of about 20 economists in support of the three Presidential appointees on the Council. He is a research associate and co-chair of the working group on Social Security research at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has served as a consultant for the Social Security Advisory Board and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation on the assumptions and methods they use to make long-term projections. Samwich has published articles in American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and a number of specialized journals and conference volumes. Since 2002, he has served as Co-editor of Economics Letters.

Linda L. Fowler (1995 – 2004)

Linda Fowler received her B.A. Political Science from Smith College, and her M.A. and Ph. D in Political Science from the University of Rochester. After a career at Syracuse University, she joined the faculty of Dartmouth College in 1995 as a Professor of Government and served as Director of the Rockefeller Center from 1995 to 2004. A nationally recognized expert on legislative politics, she is often quoted in the national news media on American politics. Professor Fowler is the author of numerous articles on American politics, and has written two books on congressional elections, Candidates, Congress, and the American Democracy andPolitical Ambition: Who Decides to Run for Congress. Fowler has testified before the House of Representatives on term limits and held positions on Capitol Hill and at the Environmental Protection Agency. She is the current Frank J. Reagan '09 Chair in Policy Studies and recently completed a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin writing a book on Congress, the president and foreign policy, entitled Congress at the Water's Edge: The Senate National Security Committees, 1947-2006, which examines the congressional oversight of the executive.

George J. Demko (1989 – 1994)

George Demko received his Ph.d from Pennsylvania State in 1964 and is a professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. He served one term as Director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center from 1989 to 1994. He has also previously served as the Director of the Geographer of the US Department of State, Program Director of Geography and Regional Science at the National Science Foundation, and Executive Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. In addition, Professor Demko is a devotee of the mystery genre. He writes and teaches the geography of mystery fiction and writes a number of columns about mysteries. He is especially interested in the settings of mysteries - the geography or the locus operandi - of crime fiction, and also specializes in international mysteries or the genre in foreign countries. He has written many columns on the evolution and adaptation of international mysteries in foreign cultures, as well as numerous articles and columns for The Armchair Detective, The Mystery Review, Mysteries Online, Mystery Books Quarterly and January Magazine, and writes for Mystery Scene Magazine.  Professor Demko is currently writing a book entitled Landscapes of Murder: The Locus Operandi of Crime Fiction.

Richard F. Winters (1986 – 1989)

Richard Winters received his B.A. from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, his M.A. for the University of Hawaii, and his 1972 Ph.D. from Stanford University. Professor Winters was hired as an Instructor of Government at Dartmouth College in 1969 and has been on the faculty since that time. Winters served as Acting Director and Director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for the Social Sciences from 1986 to 1989. Professor Winters also served as head of the Department of Government at Dartmouth in 1982, again from 1989-1991, and a third term from July of 1999 until July of 2002. He has served on several committees of the American Political Science Association and also served a term as president of the section on State Politics and Policy, one of thirty organized sections of the American Political Science Association. Professor Winters' special fields of interest are American state politics, American political economy, social welfare politics, and the politics of the budgetary process. He is co-author of How America Is Ruled and his articles have appeared in various books of collected readings, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, American Politics Quarterly, Journal of Politics, and Polity.

Franklin Smallwood '51 (1983 - 1986)

Franklin Smallwood graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in Government in 1951 and acquired his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1958. Smallwood returned to Dartmouth College in 1957 to work in the office of President John Sloan Dickey '29 before becoming a professor of Government and Associate Dean of Faculty for Social Sciences and later on, Vice President and Dean for Student Affairs. Due to his extensive involvement in the Social Sciences department at Dartmouth, he was selected as the first director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences in 1983. He is well known for introducing the first national TV debate by several Democratic presidential candidates in the1984 New Hampshire primary election to the Dartmouth campus. He retired from his position as director in 1986 and continued to teach Government until his early retirement in 1992. He relocated to Burlington, Vermont and taught graduate school at the University of Vermont. Smallwood died on October 3, 2013.