China

Kathleen Hartford

Program Officer Beijing

Kate Hartford focuses on governance and public policy work in the foundation's Beijing office. Her grant making supports the efforts of Chinese institutions and individuals, from the grassroots up to the national level, to improve government's responsiveness, accessibility and accountability to citizens, particularly those in vulnerable groups.

Kate joined the Ford Foundation in 2005, after three decades of teaching, researching and writing on China, socialist reforms and the political economy of market transitions, and on the sociopolitical consequences and uses of the Internet and networked communications. She spent 20 years at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), where she served in several departmental, college administrative and technical-advisory positions while teaching.

During her tenure at UMB, she held visiting professorships at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China and at L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at the University of Paris; held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a research fellowship at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University); and also lived and worked in China, and for short periods in Hungary, Poland, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. Before joining the UMB faculty, she taught at Amherst College.

Kate received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in political science from Bryn Mawr College. She spent her senior year in the Critical Languages Program at Princeton University, focusing on China and Asian studies.