Karen Mossberger, the Frank and June Sackton Professor in the School of Public Affairs in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University, is the recipient of the 2023 Faculty Research Achievement Award.
 
Mossberger, a distinguished political scientist and scholar of public policy and public administration, is the director of the Center on Technology, Data and Society and a senior sustainability scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. She is an expert on public policy, with a focus on the impact of internet access in the United States for individuals and communities. Her research topics include digital inequality, urban policy, digital government and the evaluation of broadband policy.
 
She has authored seven books, including her most recent work (with Caroline Tolbert and Scott LaCombe), “Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities,” which won the prestigious Goldsmith Book Prize from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University.  The book fills in the gaps of previous data and research to show with nearly two decades of evidence that inclusive and widespread broadband use over time leads to greater prosperity in communities.
 
Similarly, she examines the benefits of technology use for individuals in her 2008 book,  “Digital Citizenship:  The Internet, Society, and Participation”  with Caroline Tolbert and Ramona McNeal. The book defines the notion of "digital citizenship" to capture the extent to which individuals are capable of effectively using technology related to the internet, especially for economic opportunity and civic engagement.  The authors focus on inequality in peoples' capacities to use internet technologies and how this affects their participation in society.
 
Such inequalities also influence the ability of governments to innovate through technology, another area of her research.  Her article “The Effects of E-Government on Trust and Confidence in Government” was honored as one of the 75 most influential articles in the first 75 years of Public Administration Review, one of the field’s flagship journals.
 
Mossberger has received funding from the National Science Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and other entities to further her scholarship on digital citizenship and the policies that can lead us to more equitable digital governance and opportunity.
   
She has had a significant career of contributions, including being elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 2016. She has participated in discussions with policymakers from the local level to White House councils and the World Bank.
 
Mossberger also lives the ASU charter, working to ensure that scholarship makes an impact on communities through policy change and implementation that strives to lessen the digital divide and increase access for all community members to digital technologies.