New Faculty Faces of SPP: Fall 2022

This fall UConn School of Public Policy (SPP) welcomes two new members to our faculty!


Renzo de la Riva Agüero
Professor Renzo de la Riva Agüero

Renzo joins SPP as an Assistant Professor of Public Management. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from St. Olaf College in Minnesota, a Master of Public Policy from the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a Public Policy Ph.D. from the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University – Bloomington.

His work engages with research on local administrative capacity, community-based CSOs, collaborative governance, and environmental sustainability. Renzo’s public administration and management research assesses how varying local governance conditions in the Global South may explain performance differences between more and less complex services. Using statistical analysis and intensive qualitative fieldwork related to waste management services in Peru, he examines how service-specific municipal administrative capacity, the involvement of locally-embedded CSOs, and the contours of cogovernance may affect these performance differences.

Renzo has published his work in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and State and Local Government Review. He is also the recipient of the NASPAA 2021 Staats Emerging Scholars Award. Previously, Renzo was a public servant in the Peruvian public sector, a consultant at the World Bank in Washington, DC, and public sector manager at Deloitte Peru. 


Jinhai Yu
Professor Jinhai Yu

Jinhai joins SPP as an Assistant Professor of Public Budgeting and Finance. He holds both a Master of Public Policy and a Ph.D.in Public Policy and Adminstration from the Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky.

Before coming to SPP, Jinhai served as an Associate Professor (tenure track) at the School of Public Economics and Administration at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His primary field of interest is public budgeting and finance. Jinhai’s research examines how policymakers allocate fiscal resources to improve government performance and accountability, focusing on budgetary politics and policy, fiscal policies of natural disasters, and fiscal transparency and accountability. His research has been published or will soon appear at Public Administration Review and National Tax Journal, among others.