Jane E. Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, is founder and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Initiative, Director of the Women in the Information Age Program, and Interim Director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a senior researcher with the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing. Her research is focused at the intersection of institutions, global information and communication technologies, and governance.

Fountain is the author of Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change (Brookings Institution Press, 2001), which was awarded an Outstanding Academic Title 2002 by Choice, and has been translated into and published in Chinese, Portuguese and Japanese. Her current book project, Women in the Information Age (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), focuses on gender, institutions and technology. She has published research on information and communication technology and the development of networked forms of organization and governance in Governance, Technology in Society, Science and Public Policy, The Communications of the ACM, and other scholarly journals. Fountain has served on several governing bodies convened to foster research on information and communication technologies and governance. She holds a double PhD from Yale University in organizational behavior and in political science.