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The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) is an independent, international, nonprofit organization founded in 1923. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.

In 1923, visionary members of the American Economic Association, the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, and the American Statistical Association came together to found the Social Science Research Council, a groundbreaking organization designed to generate new insight into pressing societal issues. By 1925, representatives from the American Anthropological Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Psychological Association had joined the fledgling organization. 

For nearly 100 years the Social Science Research Council has coordinated the research, policy, and philanthropic communities in the pursuit of evidence-based policies to promote human well-being, emerging as both a pivotal force in the academy and a respected contributor to the public good. The SSRC is guided by the belief that justice, prosperity, and democracy all require better understanding of complex social, cultural, economic, and political processes. We work with practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers in the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and related professions. We build interdisciplinary and international networks, working with partners around the world to link research to practice and policy, strengthen individual and institutional capacities for learning, and enhance public access to information.

Basic Commitments

The SSRC approaches its work guided by five basic commitments:

Fostering innovation. We work on problems that need new approaches; we act as a catalyst for new thinking. We seek to mobilize the most creative and knowledgeable researchers and to help research institutions become more dynamic. Renewing existing expertise, putting knowledge to work on new problems, and generating novel data and theories are all crucial to advancing social science for the public good.

Building a diverse research community. We advocate for and support programs that create a diverse pipeline of researchers, ensuring that tomorrow’s scholars will seek answers to previously unasked questions and that the production of knowledge is informed by different contexts and perspectives.

Working internationally and democratically. Better understanding of basic social processes is a resource for improving the lives of all. It should be available to all. Participation in the production of scientific knowledge should also be as broad as possible. Many of society’s most pressing problems are global in nature and must be addressed through global collaboration.

Investing in the future. We ensure the future of knowledge production by nurturing new generations of researchers, enabling practitioners to act on scientific knowledge, enhancing cross-fertilization among intellectual fields, developing capacity where it is most lacking, and facilitating the internationalization of social science.

Combining urgency and patience. We bring researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and broader publics together to focus on topics of pressing public importance, including climate change, health, and human rights. But since even the most urgent problems are seldom solved overnight, we must learn even as we act, continually renew existing knowledge, and identify future problems and research agendas.

Equity and Inclusion

At the SSRC, diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values, and also an opportunity to explore a wide array of perspectives and social phenomena, toward the goal of enriching and advancing our understanding of the human condition.

The diversity of the SSRC staff, Board, and networks—including background, culture, experience, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, ability, and much more—strengthens the organization and our work.

As an organization widely recognized for intellectual agenda-setting, the SSRC is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all facets of our organization and work, including scholarly programs and initiatives; these efforts are emblematic of the organization’s broader and fundamental commitment to inclusiveness.

Isabelle de Lamberterie

Isabelle de Lamberterie has been a researcher on comparative law at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris since 1969 and is now director of research emerita. She has coauthored Principes du droit européen du contrat, on contract law (2004); Dictionnaire comparé du droit d’auteur et du copyright, on intellectual property (2003); and Informatique, libertés et recherche médicale, on the protection of privacy (2001). During the 1970s and 1980s, her work addressed the regulation of new technologies: informatics in Les techniques contractuelles suscitées par l’informatique (1977), and the protection of software in La protection du logiciel: Enjeux juridiques et économiques, with Gilles Bertin (1985). More recently, her focus has been partly on digitization and the Internet, nanotechnology, and the medical sector, as well as the regulation of research, and her work has generally been conducted in partnership with researchers in other disciplines. She has taught at the University of Montpellier, University of Paris XIII, and University of Poitiers and directed about twenty doctoral theses. She has held various positions in state institutions, including member of the ethics committee of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (1998–2007) and member of one of the advisory committees for the minister of research, Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche et de la Technologie (2006–2014). She currently chairs the scientific advisory committee for the program on digitization and concerted development in legal studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and is a member—as emeritus—of the Institut de Sciences Sociales du politique (ISP), Université Paris-Saclay/Université de Nanterre.

Anna Harvey

SSRC President (Ex Officio)

Anna Harvey is President of the Social Science Research Council; Professor of Politics, Affiliated Professor of Data Science and Law, and Director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University; and Co-Director of the Criminal Justice Expert Panel. The Public Safety Lab works with teams of social scientists and data scientists to support more effective and more equitable criminal justice practices. Its projects include the Jail Data Initiative, a large-scale effort to collect daily individual-level jail records in over 1,000 county jails in the United States, and the Prosecutorial Reform Initiative, a collaborative effort with district attorney’s offices to develop more effective prosecutorial policies. Professor Harvey is the author of two scholarly books and a co-authored casebook on judicial decision-making, in addition to numerous peer-reviewed articles. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Ohio University.

William Janeway

Executive Committee Investment Committee - Chair Secretary Chair

William H. Janeway is a special limited partner of Warburg Pincus. He joined Warburg Pincus in 1988 and was responsible for building the information technology investment practice. Previously, he was executive vice president and director at Eberstadt Fleming. Janeway is a director of Magnet Systems and O’Reilly Media. He is an affiliated member of the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge University. Janeway is a cofounder and member of the board of governors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking and a member of the Advisory Board of the Princeton Bendheim Center for Finance. He is a member of the management committee of the Cambridge-INET Institute, University of Cambridge, and a member of the Board of Managers of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF). He is the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators, and the State, the substantially revised and extended new edition of the book initially published by Cambridge University Press in November 2012. Janeway received his doctorate in economics from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He was valedictorian of the class of 1965 at Princeton University.

Naomi Lamoreaux

Executive Committee

Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Stanley B. Resor Professor of Economics and History at Yale University, chair of the Yale Department of History, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her BA in history from SUNY Binghamton in 1972 and her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 1979. She taught at Brown University from 1979 to 1996 and the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1996 to 2010. She has written The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904 and Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, edited five other books, and published scores of articles on business, economic, and financial history. She also coedited the Journal of Economic History from 1992 to 1996. Lamoreaux is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as president of the Business History Conference and the Economic History Association. Her current research interests include patenting and the market for technology in the United States, the rise and decline of the Cleveland innovative region, business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the United States and Europe, and the organizational roots of the constitutional right to privacy.

Margaret Levenstein

Maggie Levenstein is director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), research professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and the School of Information, and adjunct professor of business economics and policy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. She is co-director of the Michigan Federal Statistical Research Data Center, co-chair of the FSRDC Executive Committee, and associate chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She serves on the advisory boards of Computational Antitrust, OpenDP, Coordinated Access for Data, Researchers and Environments (CADRE), the Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America, Databrary, and the Qualitative Data Repository. She received her PhD in economics from Yale University and BA in economics from Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Accounting for Growth: Information Systems and the Creation of the Large Corporation, as well as numerous historical and contemporary studies of competition and of innovation. Her research also examines and produces novel, non-designed data for social and economic measurement.

Sara Miller McCune

Sara Miller McCune is the founder (and for many decades executive chairman) of SAGE Publishing. McCune transferred control of the company to an independent trust in 2021, although she remains actively involved in the company's ongoing expansion and development. McCune is also cofounder and president of the McCune Foundation, based in Ventura, California, which supports productive change through building social capital in two counties on California's Central Coast. She was a long-serving member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and is a Board member emerita of Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. McCune is a graduate of Queens College and received honorary doctorates from Queens College (CUNY), University of Sussex, University of Bath, and California State University Channel Islands. She has also been recognized as an honorary alumna of the University of California, Santa Barbara; an honorary fellow at Cardiff University; and is a recipient of the prestigious London Book Fair Lifetime Achievement Award. McCune was named a member of the American Philosophical Society (founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin) in 2018 and joined the next year.

Helen Milner

Executive Committee - Chair Investment Committee

Helen V. Milner is B. C. Forbes Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and director of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. She has written extensively on issues related to international political economy; the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy, globalization, and regionalism; and the relationship between democracy and trade policy. In addition to numerous articles, her writings include the volumes Resisting Protectionism (1988); Interests, Institutions, and Information: Domestic Politics and International Relations (1997); The Political Economy of Regionalism (coedited with Edward Mansfield, 1997); Internationalization and Domestic Politics (coedited with Robert Keohane, 1996), and Votes, Vetoes, and the Political Economy of International Trade Agreements (coauthored with Edward Mansfield, 2012). Milner is currently working on issues related to globalization and development, such as the political economy of foreign aid; the “digital divide” and the global diffusion of the Internet; and the relationship between globalization and democracy. Another strand of her recent research deals with American foreign policy and the so-called grand strategy of liberal internationalism, and she is investigating the sources of public and elite preferences for engagement with the international economy in the areas of international trade, foreign aid, and immigration. Milner is president of the International Political Science Association.

Peter Nager

Audit Committee - Chair Investment Committee

Peter Nager is a principal at the Greentech Venture Capital Investment firm Skyview Ventures. He is a former partner of the corporate advisory and investment banking firm James D. Wolfensohn Inc. Following the sale of Wolfensohn to Bankers Trust (BT), he became a partner and senior managing director at BT and assumed the same positions with Deutsche Bank upon its merger with BT. Earlier in his career, he was a lawyer at the firm Debevoise & Plimpton, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Nager is President of the Beaver Dam Sanctuary in Westchester, NY. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Black Box Institute in Toronto, Canada. Previously, Nager served as President of Symphony Space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, as Chairman of Central Park SummerStage and on the Executive Committee of the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Westchester County, NY. Nager received an A.B. (Mathematics and Economics) from Brown University and an M.B.A. and J.D. (Honors) from the University of Chicago.

Gina Neff

Gina Neff is the executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge and professor of Technology & Society at the University of Oxford. Her books include Venture Labor (MIT Press, 2012), Self-Tracking (MIT Press, 2016), and Human-Centered Data Science (MIT Press, 2022). Her research focuses on the effects of the rapid expansion of our digital information environment on workers and workplaces and in our everyday lives. Professor Neff holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia University and advises international organizations including UNESCO, the OECD, and the Women’s Forum for the Economy and Society. She chairs the International Scientific Committee of the UK’s Trusted Autonomous Systems programme and is a member of the Strategic Advisory Network for the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Her academic research has won both engineering and social sciences awards. She also led the team that won the 2021 Webby for the best educational website on the internet, for the A to Z of AI, which has reached over a million people in 17 different languages.

Melissa Nobles

Executive Committee

Melissa Nobles is Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nobles’s research and teaching have focused on the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics, and issues of retrospective justice. Her current research centers on constructing a database of racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and more often, unknown deaths and contributing to legal investigations. She is the author of two books, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Stanford University Press, 2000), The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and coeditor with Jun-Hyeok Kwak of Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asia (Routledge Press, 2013). Her scholarship has also appeared in the Annual Review of Political Science, Daedalus, American Journal of Public Health, and several edited books. Nobles is a graduate of Brown University where she majored in history. She received her MA and PhD in political science from Yale University. Nobles has held fellowships at Boston University’s Institute for Race and Social Division and Harvard University’s Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. She has served on the editorial boards of Polity, American Political Science Review, and Perspectives on Politics journals. Nobles has also been involved in faculty governance at MIT and beyond, serving as the associate chair of the MIT Faculty from 2007–2009 and vice-president of the American Political Science Association, 2013–14.

Edgar Pieterse

Professor Edgar Pieterse is founding director of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town and holds the South African Research Chair in Urban Policy. His research and teaching explore urban development politics, everyday culture, publics, radical social economies, responsive design, and adaptive governance systems. He publishes different kinds of text, curates exhibitions, as well as difficult conversations about pressing urban problems. He is consulting editor for Cityscapes—an international occasional magazine/platform on urbanism in the global South—and has published ten books dealing with a wide-ranging set of topics related to contemporary urbanism and place-making. Pieterse serves on various editorial boards of academic journals and research advisory boards of leading knowledge centers: Gauteng City-region Observatory (Johannesburg); Indian Institute for Human Settlements (Bangalore); LSE Cities (London); the Science Circle of the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Stuttgart); and Pathways to Sustainability – Utrecht University; among others. In the African context, Pieterse has been active in the growth of two key pan-African knowledge networks: Association of African Planning Schools (59 schools in 18 countries) and the African Urban Research Initiative (21 institutions in 14 countries); both are anchored in the African Centre for Cities. Current research is focused on a major exhibition—CompleXities—dealing with uncertain urban futures that will be mounted in 2022, as well as exploratory work on radical social enterprises that seeks to define alternative modalities of service delivery in African cities. Lastly, Pieterse is working on an institutional framework to promote city-level innovation ecosystems in Africa that will promote the localization of sustainable infrastructure in low-income contexts.

Walter Powell

Audit Committee Executive Committee

Walter W. Powell (Executive Committee; Audit Committee) is Jacks Family professor of education and sociology, organizational behavior, management science and engineering, and communication at Stanford University. He has been a faculty codirector of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society since it was founded in 2006. For the 2022-23 year, he will serve as the Interim Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Prior to moving to Stanford in 1999, Powell taught at Stony Brook University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Arizona. He has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, Sweden; Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; and Aalto University, Finland, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science and The British Academy. He has served on the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000. His interests focus on the processes through which ideas and practices are transferred across organizations and the role of networks in facilitating or hindering innovation. Recent books include The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, with John Padgett (Princeton U. Press) and The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, with Patricia Bromley (Stanford U. Press).

Raka Ray

Raka Ray has a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College (1985) and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1993). She is the Dean of the Social Sciences and a professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies at the University of California, Berkeley. An award-winning mentor and teacher, she is the former chair of the Institute of South Asia Studies (2003–2012), the Department of Sociology (2012–2015), and the Academic Senate Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations. Ray is much in demand as a speaker on issues ranging from gender and feminist theory, postcolonial sociology, contemporary politics in the US and India, and her current project on the transformations in gender wrought by the decline of traditional fields of work for men. Ray’s publications include Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India (University of Minnesota Press, 1999; and in India, Kali for Women, 2000), Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics, co-edited with Mary Katzenstein (Rowman and Littlefeld, 2005), Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and Class in India, with Seemin Qayum (Stanford, 2009), The Handbook of Gender (OUP India, 2011), Both Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, coedited with Amita Baviskar (Routledge, 2011), The Social Life of Gender (Sage, 2017) coedited with Jennifer Carlson and Abigail Andrews, and many articles and op-eds.

José Scheinkman

Investment Committee

José A. Scheinkman is the Edwin W. Rickert Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics emeritus at Princeton University, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Previously, Scheinkman was the Alvin H. Baum Distinguished Service Professor and chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, Blaise Pascal Research Professor (France), visiting professor at Collège de France, vice president in the Financial Strategies Group of Goldman, Sachs & Co., and coeditor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has served as a consultant to several financial institutions and is a member of the board of directors of Cosan Limited, a NYSE-listed company engaged in the production and distribution of sugar, ethanol, energy, and logistic services in Brazil. His research has focused on building mathematical models that shed light on a variety of economic and social phenomena, such as economic fluctuations, the nature of oligopolistic competition, the growth of cities, informal economic activity, the spatial distribution of crime, and the dynamics of asset prices and asset-price bubbles. Scheinkman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Econometric Society, corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and of a doctorat honoris causa from the Université Paris-Dauphine

Til Schuermann

Audit Committee Treasurer

Til Schuermann is partner and cohead of Risk & Public Policy practice for the Americas at Oliver Wyman. He advises private and public sector clients on stress testing, enterprise-wide risk management, model risk management, climate risk and governance including board effectiveness. He previously served as senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he held numerous positions, including head of Financial Intermediation in Research and head of Credit Risk in Bank Supervision. Schuermann started his career at Bell Labs. He is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Advisory Roundtable, serves on the advisory boards of the NYU Courant Institute Mathematical Finance program and NYU Stern’s Volatility Risk Institute, and is on the FRM exam committee for the Global Association of Risk Professionals. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Services Research and the Journal of Risk, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions. Schuermann has a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joseph Schull

Investment Committee

Joseph is the founder, Managing Partner and Chairman of the Investment Committee of Corten Capital and a longstanding investor in the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sector, across early stage, development capital and leveraged buyout investments. Having joined Warburg Pincus, one of the world’s leading private equity firms, in 1998, Joseph led the firm’s TMT group in Europe as well as its investment activities in Emerging Europe. He has led growth and buyout investments in B2B software and technology-enabled services, information services, cable broadband services and digital media. He also served as WP’s Head of Europe and was a member of the firm’s global Executive Management Group. Joseph holds a B.A. and M.A. from McGill University, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics and was a Guy Drummond Scholar, and he received a D. Phil from Oxford University, where he was a University Lecturer during 1990-1991. He is Chair of the Investment Committee of venture philanthropy organisation Impetus Trust, a Board member of the Social Science Research Council, and a member of the International Advisory Board of McGill University. He was born in Montreal, Canada and lives in London, UK.