Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Director of the Center for American Political Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

He graduated from Georgetown University in 1989 with distinction in Honors Government and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago in 1996. He taught previously at Princeton University (1995-1998) and the University of Michigan (1998-2002). He joined the Harvard University faculty in 2002.

Dr. Carpenter's primary interest is in the theoretical, historical and quantitative analysis of American political development, public bureaucracies and government regulation, particularly regulation of health products. His dissertation received the 1998 Harold D. Lasswell Award from the American Political Science Association and as a book - The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862-1928 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) - was awarded the APSA's Gladys Kammerer Prize as well as the Charles Levine Prize of the International Political Science Association. His newly published book on pharmaceutical regulation in the United States is entitled Reputation and Power: Organizational Image and Pharmaceutical Regulation at the FDA (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 

Professor Carpenter has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Brookings Institution and the Santa Fe Institute. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Scholars in Health Policy 1998-2000, Investigator Award in Health Policy Research 2004-2007) the Alfred Sloan Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.

With Professors Elizabeth Armstrong (Princeton) and Marie Hojnacki (Penn State), Dr. Carpenter is examining coverage of disease in the mass media and in public fora such as congressional hearings. In the coming years he is commencing a long-term project on petitioning in the nineteenth-century United States, particularly in the context of antislavery politics.