Our Featured Fellow for February 2024 is Jean-Claude Ndongo, a PhD Candidate in the School of Public Administration at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).

Jean-Claude joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2020. He has served on the Bill Anderson Fund Disaster Dash Committee from 2022 to 2023. He is currently a member of the BAF Programming Committee. He has contributed to the Diversifying HayWired Communication project, which involved a collaboration between the Bill Anderson Fund, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Natural Hazards Center. He presented his contribution to this project at the 48th annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop in July 2023.

Jean-Claude is a recipient of the Florida Education Fund’s McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. He is also FAU’s Association of Doctoral Students in Public Administration treasurer. He has been an active member of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) since 2020, where he serves as chairperson of the Section for African Public Administration’s Fundraising Committee.

Jean-Claude holds a Master’s in Business Administration from Otterbein University and a Certificate in Data Analytics from the University of Miami. Before pursuing his doctorate, he built a solid career in financial services, managing investment portfolios of high-net-worth clients and providing consumer and business banking services to individuals and small businesses. His professional experience has greatly influenced his research agenda: he focuses on how public finance and social equity policies impact the disaster resilience of underserved populations.

Jean-Claude studies the effect of government expenditures and disaster policies on small businesses owned by members of underserved populations. He has presented his work at various conferences, such as the 2021 annual conference of the Southeastern Conference for Public Administration, and annual meetings of the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management and the ASPA in 2022 and 2023. His work has been published in the African Journal of Public Administration and Management and the Journal of Public Affairs Education.

Jean-Claude is working on his dissertation using longitudinal data from the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Small Business Administration. He is conducting a quantitative study of the impact of federal disaster loans on the resilience of small businesses engaged in government contracting.

In his spare time, Jean-Claude enjoys spending time with his family and friends, attending basketball games, and playing the guitar.

You can access Jean-Claude’s publications here and connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Research interests: public budgeting and finance, public policy, business resilience to disasters, social equity.