Derek Epp

Derek Epp is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Liberal Arts. He holds a Ph.D. in American Politics with a Public Policy minor from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2015) and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Maryland (2008). Prior to joining UT Austin in 2017, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College's Nelson A. Rockefeller Center.

His research examines institutional attention allocation across policy domains, with emphasis on:

• Policy stability/punctuations: Why some policies persist while others change abruptly
• Criminal justice disparities: Racial bias in policing practices, traffic stops, and consent searches
• Political inequality: How economic disparities shape legislative agendas and representation
• Information processing: Institutional capacity to respond to emerging issues

He co-directs the Policy Agendas Project, tracking policy attention across government institutions.

His publication trends focus on policing reforms (especially post-George Floyd), healthcare access disparities, welfare policy, and budgetary politics, using advanced statistical analysis of large-scale datasets including 200 million voter records and 20 million traffic stops.

He teaches courses including:

• GOV 358: Introduction to Public Policy
• GOV 384M: Policy Evaluation
• GOV 370N: Research on US Congress