Andrew S. Pennock

About

Andy Pennock is an associate professor of public policy at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. An experiential leadership educator, Pennock helps students, executives, and elected officials lead change in complex systems by sharpening their ability to diagnose leadership and policy challenges, building their capacity to mobilize change, and deepening their self-awareness as leaders.

At Batten, he teaches courses on leadership and change management, applied policy analysis, and state politics and policy. In his leadership courses, students bring their own adaptive challenges into the classroom as cases, using their experience as a laboratory for diagnosing how power, institutions, and group dynamics shape what change is possible. In his applied policy capstone, MPP students take ownership of yearlong projects for real public-sector clients, learning to analyze challenges and generate action that drives progress.

Pennock has served UVA and Batten through periods of significant institutional change. He co-chaired the Provost’s Generative AI in Teaching and Learning Taskforce, helping shape how the University is navigating AI in higher education, and was elected by his faculty colleagues to the Faculty Senate’s Executive Council, which advises the President and Provost on major institutional issues. At Batten, he serves as Faculty Director of the MPP Orientation Program and coordinates the Applied Policy Project — the school’s two-semester applied capstone in which MPP students partner with real-world clients on public policy challenges — work recognized with the Batten School Service Award.

Pennock writes about pedagogy for both academic and practitioner audiences. He is the author of The CQ Press Guide to Writing in Public Policy (2nd ed., 2023), now used in more than 70 classrooms nationally. He authored “When Students Are the Case Protagonists” in Harvard Business Publishing’s Inspiring Minds with Tim O’Brien. His scholarship has also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Economics & Politics, and PS: Political Science & Politics.

Pennock also focuses on developing leaders beyond Batten’s MPP. As a recurring faculty contributor to the Partnership for Leaders in Education (UVA-PLE) at UVA’s Darden School of Business — a multi-year national program for school district leaders —  he equips superintendents and principals to drive systems change in some of the nation’s largest public school systems. He has also worked with senior federal executives at the Federal Executive Institute, OPM’s flagship leadership development program for the senior executive service; state legislators and mayors through the Rodel Fellows and the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute; medical leaders through UVA Health; and international cohorts at the IEDC Bled School of Management in Slovenia.

Pennock’s teaching has been recognized with the 2025 All-University Teaching Award from the University of Virginia, the 2023–24 Batten Excellence in Teaching Award, and a 2023–24 Fulbright Scholar Award. Prior to joining Batten in 2015, Pennock was Director of Graduate Studies at Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his B.A. in Political Science and Mathematics from Clemson University.

Outside of Batten, Pennock is the father of four wonderful boys who banter with him all the time. He and his wife, Charity, love to cook, read, garden, travel, and have good conversation whenever they can.