Mary Jo Waits is a senior fellow with the Center for the Future of Arizona. In July 2004, she founded a new public policy consulting firm, Mary Jo Waits and Associates LLC, which has assisted the City of Phoenix in developing a downtown strategy centered on a new Arizona State University campus and a new Biomedical complex. She also assisted the Arizona Board of Regents with a redesign of Arizona's public university system in 2004 and produced the March 2005 report Meds and Eds: The Key to Arizona Leapfrogging Ahead in the 21 st Century.
For more than a decade, Mary Jo was Associate Director of the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, a "think tank" at Arizona State University. She oversaw the Institute's project development, publications, research and analysis. She was one of two lead consultants for Arizona's economic development strategies--Arizona's Strategic Plan for Economic Development, 1990 and Arizona's Partnership for the New Economy, 2001. She was principal author of The New Economy: A Guide for Arizona and The New Economy: Policy Choices for Arizona . She was project director for the October 2000 report, Hits and Misses: Fast Growth in Metropolitan Phoenix. She was commissioned by the Alliance for Regional Stewardship to produce a monograph, The Downtowns of the Future: Opportunities for Regional Stewards in 2001. Based on that work, Ms. Waits also served as a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Expert-in-Resident.
She was the principal author of Five Shoes Waiting to Drop on Arizona's Future , the fourth publication in the Morrison Institute's Arizona Policy Choices report series. The National Conference of State Legislatures awarded the "Five Shoes" report a 2002 Notable Document Award. She was the principal author of Which Way Scottsdale?, a report widely acclaimed for shaping that city's -and other cities'--strategy to lead in the knowledge economy.
In 2002, she received the Desert Peaks Regional Excellence Award as the single individual who demonstrated exemplary commitment to the spirit of regionalism. She was nominated for the award by the City of Phoenix because of her positive impact on the public debate and policy choices in the region and in Arizona.
She is a member of the Economic Development Quarterly's editorial board. She has written extensively on the industry clusters' approach to economic development. Her articles on economic development have been published in Public Administration Review , Economic Development Quarterly , and Economic Development Commentary .
Ms. Waits holds a master's degree in public administration from the University of Southern California. She was a doctoral candidate (ABD) at the University of Michigan.
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