Master's in Sports Industry Management
Michael Fanning

Mike Fanning is a project manager with 35 years of management experience in the public and private sectors. In addition to teaching in the Project Management and Sports Industry Management programs at Georgetown and managing projects for the Office of Faculty & Staff Benefits where he serves as Benefits Service Officer, he holds appointments as an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California and at Indiana Wesleyan University. He also teaches sports project management, ethics and Bridge to Learning courses for Jesuit Worldwide Learning to students from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, Malawi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo who live in refugee camps.  

His current research focus and experiential learning activities include a feasibility analysis for a "Plow to Plate" project by Chef Jose Andres' World Central Kitchen in the Dominican Republic, business analysis and requirements elicitation for implementation of the proposed FEED Act, implementation of the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (PMIAA) within federal agencies, and developing soccer analytics for DC United.

Following positions at the White House and the Washington Post, Mike served as the environmental chief of staff and as the senior environmental executive for the U.S. Postal Service and was Project Director for the project initiation, planning, testing and deployment of the national Bio-Detection System at 275 sites after the 2001 anthrax attacks.

He managed the environmental, energy, emergency preparedness, response, and recovery programs and established his agency’s first Project Management Office. Mike also ran the federal mail irradiation program and maintained liaison with the White House, Congress, state and local regulators and first responders. During his tenure, the Postal Service received 40 White House “Closing the Circle” awards for environmental excellence and won the national “Climate Champion” award from the Climate Registry.

Mike earned his B.A. in Government and Sociology from Georgetown University, his M.S. in Environmental, Safety and Health Management from the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied crisis management and risk communications at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He became a Project Management Professional (PMP) in 2003, won the U.S. Postal Service’s Project Manager of the Year award in 2004, earned a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in 2010 and a certificate in Agile Project Management from Villanova in 2019.

He holds four patents in emergency and environmental management.