Professor Glover Named the 2024 Presidential Public Achievement Award Winner
Professor Rob Glover has been named the 2024 Presidential Public Achievement Award winner. Glover has dedicated his career to empowering students and fellow researchers to engage in the democratic process. Through his work as associate professor of political science and honors, he has brought actionable policy insights to political leaders and mentored UMaine students on how to become political changemakers.
Since 2016, Glover has co-led UMaine UVote, a nonpartisan student voting effort to encourage voter registration, educate young voters and bolster election turnout. He initiated the UMaine UVote Student Ambassadors program, a peer-to-peer outreach and organizing model. His team has trained students and assisted with local elections administration. This has led to marked increases in student voter turnout. Because of his efforts, more than 85% of UMaine students registered to vote and 73% voted in 2020. As a result, UMaine was recognized nationally for civic engagement by Washington Monthly and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge.
Since 2017, he has acted as co-leader of Maine’s chapter of the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN). The organization works to improve public policy and strengthen democracy through communicating expertise embedded within scholarly communities. As part of Maine SSN, he helped place more than 330 op-eds on contemporary policy issues from Maine scholars in the Bangor Daily News and Kennebec Journal. He has also helped scholars publish in national and global media outlets.
At UMaine, Glover developed an advanced policy research seminar that engages students in codesigning and co-executing a policy research project with their peers and community partners. He has served as a faculty fellow and board member at Brandeis University’s Educational Network for Active Civic Transformation (ENACT), which empowers college educators across the country to develop engaged policy courses.
Community impact and relationships with those affected by public policy often serve as the starting point for his scholarly research. His statewide work on policy attitudes toward overdose and the opioid crisis has helped drive conversations about policy response. He has also worked closely with research collaborators and the Maine Town and City Clerks’ Association to investigate local election officials’ perceptions of Maine’s move to ranked choice voting.
Congratulations to Professor Glover on this prestigious and well-deserved honor.