José L Irizarry

José Luis Irizarry, Ph.D., is a tenure-track assistant professor of Public Administration at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). His research focuses on public and nonprofit pedagogy, social equity, mindfulness, human resource development and motivation, professional norms, values and ethics, and community and civic engagement.

Dr. Irizarry has published in leading public service journals, including Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), Public Integrity, and the Journal of Public Affairs Education. Additionally, he co-authored two chapters (“An Introduction to Civic Engagement” and “An Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector”) in Civic Engagement in the Composition Classroom: A Guide for Community-Based Writing, edited by Diana I. Dabek (published by Kendal-Hunt).

In higher education, Dr. Irizarry has instructed more than 1,200 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in criminal justice, public administration, and nonprofit studies, collectively in 6 colleges and universities in New York, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. Prior to joining NCCU, Dr. Irizarry was a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Public Management and Policy (SPMP) at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS), where he instructed courses on nonprofits, public administration, public service norms and values, civic engagement, and social equity. At SPMP, he also served as program/student advisor for the Graduate Certificate in Management of Nonprofit Organizations. At UIS, he also served as a 2022–2024 Online, Professional, and Engaged Learning (OPEL) Faculty Fellow and as an advisory board member for UIS’s Center for Faculty Excellence.

Dr. Irizarry remains actively engaged in the profession and currently serves as an editorial board member of Public Integrity; chair-elect of the American Society for Public Administration’s (ASPA) Section on Democracy and Social Justice; secretary of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action’s (ARNOVA) Teaching Section; and board member for Social Media for ASPA’s LGBT Advocacy Alliance (which he helped establish more than 10 years ago). Additionally, Dr. Irizarry has completed academic manuscript reviews for multiple journals, including Public Integrity, the Journal of Public Affairs Education, Administrative Theory & Praxis, the Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, and the Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless, as well as book proposals and book manuscripts for multiple publishers such as Routledge, Cognella Academic Publishing, and Cambridge University Press.

His previous service activities include serving as (the first) student representative and later as district 1 representative on ASPA’s National Council; secretary and later vice president of the New York State Political Science Association (which he helped incorporate in NYS); 2023 program committee member and co-chair of the Public Policy and Administration Subfield for the Midwest Political Science Association Conference; and 2022 co-chair of the National Academy of Public Administration’s (NAPA) Social Equity Leadership Conference (SELC) hosted by the University of San Francisco.

As a practitioner, he has extensive experience working in and with numerous public service/nonprofit organizations, including Housing Works, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, the Harvey Milk School, Living Beyond Belief, Boca Helping Hands, the Girl Scouts of Greater New York, the American Jewish Committee, Jewish National Fund, the Riverside Church, the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, the Association of Inspectors General, and the New York Public Library.

For more information, please see the following:

• ORCID
• Web of Science
• Google Scholar