Jayce Farmer, Ph.D., is an assistant professor and a director of the School of Public Policy and Leadership at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research focuses on local public finance, urban sustainability, county government administration, state and local relations, and interlocal collaboration. Farmer served as the graduate programs coordinator for the School of Public Policy and Leadership from 2018-21. In this role, he directed both the MPA and Ph.D. in Public Affairs programs. He joined the faculty at UNLV in 2016.

Prior to joining UNLV, he was a faculty member at Northern Kentucky University, and at Texas State University. While at Texas State University, he served as the director of the Center for Research, Public Policy, and Training. In this role, he provided technical assistance to local jurisdictions in Central Texas and established an ongoing survey research program on citizen satisfaction within local Texas communities.

Farmer had an accomplished career in applied settings prior to assuming a faculty position.  Here, he worked for nearly nine years as a practitioner in municipal government fiscal administration in Florida. In this capacity, he worked in budgeting for the City of Tampa and the City of Tallahassee. While in Tallahassee, he coordinated and oversaw the city’s capital improvement plan and worked with the budgets of several major city departments. His expertise gained from this experience is what led to his curiosity about local government decision making, and it currently fuels both his research and teaching interests.

He has widely published on a variety of state and local government policy issues in several peer-reviewed academic journals, including: The American Review of Public Administration, Urban Affairs Review, State and Local Government Review, and Publius: The Journal of Federalism.