Deil S. Wright, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Political Science, is a native of Michigan and holds BA, MPA, and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan. His professional teaching career includes membership on the faculties of Wayne State University, The University of Iowa, The University of California at Berkeley (as Visiting Professor) and The University of New Mexico (as Carl Hatch Visiting Professor). He joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 1967 as Professor of Political Science. In 1975 he was elected as a fellow (member) of National Academy of Public Administration. From 1973 to 1980 he was Director of the Master of Public Administration (MPA) Program, and in 1983 he was designated by The University Board of Trustees as Alumni Distinguished Professor. He has also been recognized by MPA alumni by an endowed lecture series named in his honor.

Professor Wright has authored or coauthored numerous books, monographs, research reports, and articles in the fields of public administration, state and local government, federalism, intergovernmental relations, and public finance. Major publications include: Public Administration and the Public (1958); Profile of a Metropolis (1962); Trends and Variations in Local Finances (1965); Intergovernmental Action on Environmental Policy (1968); Intergovernmental Relations in the United States (1973); Assessing the Impacts of General Revenue Sharing in the Fifty States (1975); Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations: 1940-1983 (1984); Understanding Intergovernmental Relations (1978, 1982, and 1988); and Globalization and Decentralization (1996). In addition to authoring more than one hundred published articles, he is the author or co-author of a similar number of unpublished professional papers and research reports.

His teaching and research interests focus on public administration generally with special attention to state and local executive behavior, organization theory, and federalism and intergovernmental relations. He completed (in 1975) research under a National Science Foundation grant on the impacts of general revenue sharing in the fifty states. Three editions of his book, Understanding Intergovernmental Relations, have provided overviews of this important policy field and this volume has been recognized as a definitive work in the field. He has been a consultant to various national, state, and local governmental agencies, including the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. In 1968-69 he served on a presidential advisory task force making recommendations on new policies in the field of intergovernmental fiscal relations. In 1971, 1975, and 1981, he testified at congressional committees hearings on general revenue sharing, federalism, and intergovernmental relations. He is currently engaged in studying devolution/decentralization in Japan, Korea, and the United States, in the last case as illustrated by the local-level implementation of welfare reform.

From 1970-74 he was a member of the Director's Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health. He was an advisor to a former Governor of North Carolina, a member (1973-1977) of the North Carolina Council on State Goals and Policies, and a member (1985-1993) of the North Carolina State Internship Council. Over the past four decades he has lectured and occasionally consulted in Europe, Australia, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and Africa under the sponsorship of the U.S. Information Agency (as well as several national universities) on topics ranging from federalism and public policy to organization theory and biomedical research policy. From 1979 to 1989 he was a member of the Tax Policy Round Table of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, MA.

He is the recipient of several awards for distinguished scholarly contributions to the field of federalism and intergovernmental relations from sections of both the American Political Science Association and the American Society for Public Administration. The American Society for Pubic Administration designated him the year 2000 recipient of the Dwight Waldo Award for outstanding contributions to the literature and leadership of public administration through an extended career. He has also received the W.E. and F.A. Mosher Award for the best article published by an academic in Public Administration Review for 1999 (Vol. 59). The American Political Science Association twice (1998 and 2000) conferred the Herbert Kaufman Award for the best paper presented in public administration at the 1997 and 1999 conferences.

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