Partnership Expands Rigorous CLPS Research Internship to New Community of Students

Albany, NY — Hudson Valley Community College has joined the Rockefeller Institute’s Center for Law & Policy Solutions (CLPS), a collaborative initiative that studies how decisions of law and policy affect ordinary people and communities.

The new partnership opens the rigorous, rewarding CLPS undergraduate research internship to Hudson Valley’s dynamic and diverse student body. The internship partners undergraduate students with Rockefeller Institute experts to research a single policy question of pressing state or national importance each semester.

A recent CLPS report on access to reproductive services in New York State won multiple academic awards and garnered statewide media coverage.

“The paid CLPS internship has proven itself to be a challenging, rewarding opportunity for undergraduate students as well as an important source of policy analysis and guidance,” said Rockefeller Institute President Jim Malatras. “This new partnership with Hudson Valley Community College taps a huge pool of talent and diversity and offers Hudson Valley students a truly unique internship experience. I thank President Roger Ramsammy for his enthusiastic participation, and I look forward to working with research interns from the Capital Region’s largest community college.”

“This is an outstanding opportunity for our students to get real world experience in the understanding and analysis of public policy,” said Hudson Valley Community College President Roger A. Ramsammy. “It’s especially significant that our students will get this kind of research experience at this stage of their undergraduate education.”

Robert “Sid” Whitaker, associate professor of history, philosophy, and social sciences at Hudson Valley, will serve as a faculty advisor to the Center for Law & Policy Solutions. Already, the fall 2019 cohort of CLPS research interns includes two of the Troy community college’s students.

The Center for Law & Policy Solutions is a collaboration among the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, and the University at Buffalo School of Law.

The CLPS internship program has produced analyses of drug treatment courts in the context of the opioid crisis, access to reproductive services in New York State, and college-in-prison programs in New York. Learn more here.