Valentine Lamar

Valentine A. Lamar is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public Affairs and Administration (SPAA) at Rutgers University–Newark. Her broad research interests encompass corruption, governance, institutions, citizen engagement, and public policy. Her current research examines
the indicators, causes and consequences of citizens’ perception of government corruption. Specifically, she is reviewing with the goal of identifying and analyzing citizen-based measures which can be used to facilitate empirical studies of individual-level antecedents and effects of
perceived corruption. She is also exploring the cognitive mechanisms that shape personal bribery experiences on corruption perceptions, as well as the differential impacts of perceived corruption of state and local authorities on citizen’s protest activism. In forthcoming work, she will apply big data analytics to evaluate New Jersey’s anti-corruption policies and analyze the relationship between public health spending and health outcome disparities. Lamar has presented her research at many academic conferences and workshops, including the American Society of Public Administration, the Southeastern Conference for Public Administration, the Public Management Research Association, and the International Young Scholars Workshop. She was honored with an Outstanding Student Paper of Year Award by ASPA’s Section on Ethics and Integrity in Governance in 2021.

Lamar received her MPA degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia. An avid sports enthusiast, she also enjoys outdoor activities, farming, reading, solving puzzles and volunteering her time and energy in one-to-one mentoring friendships with young people.