TWO JOBS HAVE INTRIQUED David T. Ellwood throughout his life. As an admittedly nerdy teenager, he harbored the somewhat unusual ambition to one day become the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation (ASPE) at what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The inspiration for this dream came from Ellwood’s father, a doctor who worked on health care reform with Lewis Butler, the ASPE in the Nixon administration. (Paul Ellwood is credited with coining the term “health maintenance organization.”) Listening to his father’s impassioned dinnertime discussions and frequent, admiring mentions of Butler piqued the younger Ellwood’s curiosity and desire to one day become the ASPE himself.

But more on that in a bit. On July 1, Ellwood, professor of political economy, stepped up to his second dream job when he replaced Joseph S. Nye, Jr., to become dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. “I am genuinely ecstatic and thrilled to be doing this,” Ellwood says. “It’s an important time in the world — a scary time, in many ways, when the ratio of rhetoric to reason has got a little out of hand. The challenges are daunting. But that makes the opportunities and responsibilities of a school such as ours all the greater.”

An economist by training who specializes in poverty and welfare issues, Ellwood grew up on Christmas Lake, 30 minutes outside of Minneapolis. Aside from his father’s example, he credits his early interest in public service to an experience he had as a high school volunteer at a program for disadvantaged children. “There was one boy who was a huge problem,” Ellwood recalls. “The teacher and the teacher’s aide couldn’t handle him, so they kept giving him to me.” Nothing seemed to work, until one day, when the children were asked to draw a tree. “This kid couldn’t have been very old,” says Ellwood. “Maybe 12 or 13 years old. He drew the most beautiful tree you’ve ever seen in your life. It was spectacular. After that, I had a way to connect with him — there was something he cared about, something he was good at, and he blossomed. It sounds corny, but it really made me believe that there was hope.”

Ellwood graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1975, with a degree in economics, then went on to receive his PhD from the university. He joined the faculty of the Kennedy School in 1980, just two years after it moved to its current site. Some advised him to stick with the more traditional career path and seek a position in a traditional economics department, but Ellwood was drawn to the intersection of research, practice, and policy the school offered. Today the same is true for many of the Kennedy School’s students. “Those who come here do so in spite of someone they admire suggesting a safer route — ‘Go to law school, go to business school,’” he comments. “And yet they come. There’s a desire to think beyond a client or a company to something larger than themselves.”

THE AUTHOR of numerous books and articles, Ellwood, 50, is clearly passionate about his current research on the changing structure of American families. High-skilled women are postponing marriage and children, he notes, while low-skilled women may postpone marriage but not children. “As a result, we have an increasingly small group of children born to high-skilled parents who are among the most financially advantaged the nation’s ever known,” says Ellwood. “At the other end, we have a significant portion of children who are among the most economically disadvantaged. This raises profound questions for the future of the work force, productivity, and education.”

Whatever its focus, Ellwood’s work has always sought to bring about change through a real-world understanding of what it means to be poor. With the 1988 publication of Poor Support: Poverty in the American Family, he presented a convincing road map for rethinking welfare. The tough love, sink-or-swim approach of cutting off aid wouldn’t work, he argued; nor would throwing more money at the system. Instead, Ellwood proposed a third way that called for time limits on welfare combined with universal health care, guaranteed child support, expanded training programs, and wage supplements. Government-subsidized jobs were another aspect of the solution, but only as a stopgap measure. Selected as a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, the book won a wide readership.

Ellwood then launched himself into the self-described role of “policy entrepreneur,” serving tirelessly on various state welfare task forces and testifying before Congress on the issue. He also wrote a report that summarized his views on welfare for the National Commission on Children. There it caught the eye of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who included many of Ellwood’s ideas on welfare reform in his 1992 campaign for the presidency. In what Ellwood has described as “the klieg lights and sound bites of an election,” this translated to Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it.”

A month after the election, Donna Shalala asked Ellwood to come to Washington to serve as ASPE in the Department of Health and Human Services. A little more than 20 years after learning about the job, Ellwood’s dream had come true. And he had company — Professor Mary Jo Bane, his colleague and collaborator at the Kennedy School, was named assistant secretary of children and families. With White House aide Bruce Reed, they would co-chair Clinton’s committee on welfare reform.

When asked about his time in Washington, Ellwood is diplomatic. “It was a terrific experience overall, although there were parts I didn’t enjoy as much,” he admits. In 1994 — the year the welfare reform bill was introduced — Republicans gained the majority in Congress. In the messy give-and-take of politics, Clinton agreed to support a revised bill that included work requirements and time limits but axed much of the support structure Ellwood had envisioned. States were given the power to architect their own welfare-to-work programs and potentially enact even stricter guidelines than those mandated on the federal level.

Ellwood resigned and returned to the Kennedy School in the summer of 1995, to serve as academic dean (Bane would follow a year later). From Cambridge, he urged Clinton to veto what would become the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. “Welfare politics has turned ugly,” he wrote in a New York Times editorial published in July 1996. “Rhetoric has replaced reality: saying a bill is about work or that cuts are in the best interests of children does not make it so.”

“Sure, there are lessons I learned from my experience in Washington,” Ellwood says philosophically. “Could I imagine going back there some day? Of course. But no time soon. This is my job now. It’s the right time for me to be dean.”

FOR ELLWOOD, the concept of family is much more than an abstract notion or research topic. He and his wife, Marilyn, have two daughters: Malinda, a recent graduate of Bates College, works at the Boston nonprofit Health Care for All, while Andrea is a junior at Harvard. Marilyn Ellwood is a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, a government consulting firm, where she works on Medicaid issues. Marrying her, Ellwood says, “was the best decision I ever made in my life.”

It wasn’t an easy feat to accomplish, however. Ellwood met Marilyn Rymer at Urban Systems Research and Engineering, where he was hired for his first job out of college to work on issues around Medicaid eligibility. He was an underling, she was his boss. It didn’t seem like the most likely pairing, but Ellwood remained undaunted. He worked with Rymer for only a few months before being lured away to a position in California with Lewis Butler, the former ASPE with whom his father had worked. The two met again when Rymer traveled to California to conduct field research; then, after Ellwood’s one-year position with Butler ended, he returned to Rymer’s home turf in Cambridge to enroll in graduate school and continue the courtship. “The rest is history,” Ellwood smiles. Two years after meeting, the pair married at the Belmont town hall. Both enjoy hiking, kayaking, and skiing, and escape to their house near Bar Harbor, Maine, whenever possible.

Ellwood acknowledges that those getaways will no doubt become less frequent, given the demanding workload and travel schedule the dean’s position requires. In these early days of his tenure, Ellwood says he’s still in “listening mode,” absorbing a variety of suggestions on new intellectual directions for the school. He names three themes, however, that are central to his strategy: partnership, excellence, and impact.

“At its best, the Kennedy School works across boundaries,” says Ellwood. His goal is to form stronger partnerships within the school — between faculty, staff, students, and alumni — as well as closer partnerships with the Harvard community at large, including undergraduates, whom he describes as “a force of nature.” The university’s development of the 200-acre parcel of land in Allston will place the Kennedy School campus squarely in the middle of Harvard’s future campus. “It’s a unique opportunity,” Ellwood notes. “We’ll be centrally located to help make the connections throughout the university.”

Ellwood also calls for achieving even greater excellence at the school. “The problems that we deal with at the Kennedy School are so important and so complex that we have to be spectacular. Part of that means recognizing that we can’t be all things to all people — we have to think about focus, continue to bring in the very best students, and ensure that they get into the positions that offer the most influence and opportunity.”

This ties into the theme of impact, of course. “We should measure ourselves to the extent that our ideas are powerful and influential,” Ellwood states. “Ultimately we’re here because we want to change the world — we want to make a difference. Our students should not be deterred from that goal by the high cost of education.”

And once those students are launched on their various paths of influence, Ellwood wants to stay in touch. “Alumni are a critical part of who we are, and I’d like to see them become even more involved with the school,” he says. “I want to find out more about what they’re up to and what they took away from their experience here. This goes back to the idea of excellence — alumni feedback will raise the bar for the school even higher.”

With his experience in government and academia — an “in and outer,” like Joe Nye before him — Ellwood will no doubt bring a cross-disciplinary approach to his role as dean. “If we head in too many different directions, the walls that can divide us will rise back up,” he cautions. “People forget the larger mission that binds us together. My hope as dean is to maintain and expand our sense of community and our sense of mission.”

Ellwood’s final goal is simplest. “I want to have fun,” he says. “I wouldn’t have taken this job if I didn’t think we could have fun.” All joking aside, Ellwood adds, “I want this to be a school where we move forward with a clear sense of direction and mission to do the very serious work we’re meant to do. I’m very proud to be here.”

Julia Hanna is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.