Data Fair Presenters

J. Trent Alexander is the Associate Director and a Research Professor at ICPSR. He has played key roles in building and supporting some of the most important data resources in the social sciences. Alexander is also a historical demographer and an administrator at ICPSR.

Margo Anderson is Distinguished Professor Emerita [ History & Urban Studies] at the University of Wisconson - Milwaukee. She specializes in American social, urban and women's history and has research interests in both urban history and the history of the social sciences and the development of statistical data systems, particularly the census. Her publications include the second edition of The American Census: A Social History (Yale University Press, 2015); Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census: From the Constitution to the American Community Survey (ACS), 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011), coedited with Constance F. Citro and Joseph J. Salvo; and a coedited volume with Victor Greene, Perspectives on Milwaukee's Past (University of Illinois Press, 2009). With UWM Professor Amanda Seligman, she is Lead Editor of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. In 2006 she served as the President of the Social Science History Association.

Professor Armstrong specializes in statistics and data analysis. His research spans topics from measurement and latent trait estimation to the role of non-linearity and data mining techniques in statistical models.

Catherine Allen-West is the Director of Communications at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. She has over 12 years of experience in strategic communications planning, media outreach, science writing, editing, website development, and digital communications.

Dr. Tracey A. Benson is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. His research explores the vestiges of structural racism in K-12 education that continue to impede the academic success of students of color. His book, Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism, was released with Harvard Education Press in August 2019.

I'm a baby boomer. I was raised in a Minnesota suburb during the 1950s. I really took to reading, and I often read the magazines and newspapers in my parents' and grandparents' homes. People recall the 50s as a placid decade, but I remember reading lots of worried articles. Senator McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover warned about Communist subversion, of course, but there were plenty of other 50s fears, such as juvenile delinquents, rock and roll, organized crime, and inadequate schools. My fascination with social problems began early.

Today, I'm a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware. My writing focuses on understanding how and why we become concerned with particular issues at particular moments in time-why we find ourselves worried about road rage one year, and identity theft a year or so later. I've written about the ways bad statistics creep into public debates, and about dubious fears, such as the mistaken belief that poisoned Halloween candy poses a serious threat to our kids.

David Bleckley joined ICPSR in 2014 and has worked as a Data Curator, Curation Supervisor, and Data Project Manager. He currently manages the Mid-century Census Project, along with several other projects. He has over fifteen years of experience collecting, analyzing, curating, linking, and disseminating data at national, state, and local levels. His education background includes a Master's in Public Administration and a B.A. in Anthropology/Archaeology. He is passionate about facilitating data access for communities, practitioners, and researchers and using data to dismantle racism, injustice, and inequality.

Anne M. Brown is an Assistant Professor and Science Informatics and Health Analytics Coordinator at Virginia Tech, serving in University Libraries. Her role is to collaborate with faculty and students on the integration of computational thinking and discipline-specific computational tools into their research labs and classrooms. She has expertise in bioinformatics and computational biology, as well as finding data-centric solutions for consultations across campus and with partners from various domains. She is involved in the training and mentorship of undergraduate research students in these areas, in addition to creating communities of practice that have students training, applying, and solving data problems on campus. She pursues pedagogical research in best routes and frameworks for experiential learning and workforce development. She recently received the Virginia Tech Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award for these endeavors and was named Outstanding Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor. and using data to dismantle racism, injustice, and inequality.

Megan Chenoweth, Data Manager/Curator, is a librarian with experience in information management, technical writing, training, and technical support. She helps SEH researchers create and preserve datasets of neighborhood contextual measures in NaNDA and provides data management support for wave 6 of Americans' Changing Lives. Megan has a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Hamilton College and a master's degree in library and information science from Drexel University.

Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, and Professor in the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, Dr. Clarke received her Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of Toronto in 2000. Her research interests are in social epidemiology, social gerontology, life course perspectives, models of disability, and population health. Her current work examines the role of the built environment on mobility disability, cognitive function, and social participation; the effect of the urban environment on disability trajectories over time; the health and social factors influencing the use of assistive devices; and cross-national disparities in disability and psychosocial resources (comparing data from the US Health and Retirement Study and the English Longitudinal Study on Ageing). She has used geographic information systems (GIS) to examine the relationship between the built environment and disability progression in vulnerable older adults in the Detroit area. She has used various methods to capture characteristics in the built environment, including the use of secondary data sources (e.g., Census, Info USA), in-person neighborhood audits (using Systematic Social Observation), and virtual web-based neighborhood audits (using Google Street View). She has compared the reliability and validity of these different methods, publishing one of the first papers on the use of Google Street View for this purpose.

D’Vera Cohn is a senior writer and editor at Pew Research Center. She studies and writes about demographics in the United States, especially the census. Cohn was a Washington Post reporter for 21 years, mainly writing about demographics, and was the newspaper’s lead reporter for the 2000 census. Before joining Pew Research Center, she served as a consultant and freelance writer for the Brookings Institution and Population Reference Bureau. Cohn is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and is a former Nieman Fellow. She is an author of studies on the marriage and birth rates in the United States, migration between the U.S. and Mexico, and U.S. population projections. Cohn manages Pew Research Center’s @allthingscensus Twitter account. She has spoken at national journalism conferences about how reporters can make use of demographic data in stories and often talks about the Center’s findings in print and broadcast media.

Dominic Corva is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy (CASP), a federal 501(c)(3) research and education nonprofit, and co-director of HIIMR. Dr. Corva has conducted cannabis market and policy research since 2008 and his findings have been presented by invitation to a wide array of public, private and NGO stakeholders. Most recently, Dr. Corva co-authored cannabis equity grant applications for Humboldt and Mendocino Counties that brought in more than $6 million, in partnership with the California Center for Rural policy. He is currently focused on cannabis markets and social equity program design, implementation, and outcomes.

Christian Davenport's research interests include political conflict, such as human rights violations, genocide/politicide, torture, political surveillance, civil war and social movements, as well as measurement, racism and popular culture. Dr. Davenport is currently working on numerous books: Stopping State Repression (with Ben Appel); In Search of a Number: Rethinking Rwanda, 1994 (with Allan Stam); and, Understanding Untouchability (with numerous authors). He is also engaged in various projects concerning state-dissident interactions in the United States, India and Northern Ireland as well as a global project of Perpetrator-Victim Dyads for 1976-2006.

Linda Detterman serves as ICPSR's Membership & Communications Unit Director. The M&C team is composed of professionals concentrating on the user experience in web services, graphic design and video services, editorial and social media content development and management, conferences and event management, and the ICPSR membership and Summer Program.

Linda came to ICPSR from MORPACE International, a market research and consulting firm located in Farmington Hills, MI, where she was a Vice President of Planning and Research. She has also held marketing and strategic planning positions at Doner Advertising and The Los Angeles Times. She received her MBA from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and BA in Business Administration from Alma College.

The purpose of the Membership and Communications Unit within ICPSR is to create and support awareness, engagement, development, and use of ICPSR products and services as well as the sponsors who support ICPSR's quest for thoughtful data stewardship and training. This unit strives for continuous improvement in the user experience including advancements in electronic and information technology that make content accessible to people with disabilities.

ICPSR staff in this unit endeavor to accomplish this purpose through: exceptional and accessible design; frequent and engaging communications, training and outreach activities; collection, distribution, and implementation of user feedback; ongoing pursuit of improvement in the user experience; respect for each other and having fun. This unit supports global audiences that include member institutions and their Official Representatives (ORs), data producers and depositors, data users, sponsors, other ICPSR units, and those seeking training and leadership in data stewardship and data analysis.

Jill Esau is the Educational Programs Administrator for the University of Michigan's Program in Survey Methodology and Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques. An accomplished educational administrator with a proven record of successful program planning and implementation, Jill earned her master's degree in Higher Education Student Affairs from Eastern Michigan University. With proficient student recruitment and advising skills, Jill's key focus is supporting the engagement, learning, and success of students enrolled in the graduate and summer programs.

Tom Ewing is professor of history at Virginia Tech. His research on the history of epidemics, including Russian flu (1889) and Spanish flu (1918), has been published in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, Current Research in Digital History, Computer IEEE and Medical History.

Katie R. Genadek is an Economist working for the U.S. Census Bureau. She directs the Census Longitudinal Infrastructure Project (CLIP), which develops, documents, and disseminates the Census Bureau's linked data infrastructure for research. Dr. Genadek also supports the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs) in order to make this data available to researchers around the U.S. She previously worked at the University of Minnesota where she managed the IPUMS-USA data project and directed the outreach efforts for all IPUMS data projects. She is a labor economist and her research is focused on the relationship between work and family for individuals, couples and parents.

Ann Glusker is the Sociology, Demography, & Quantitative Research Librarian at University of California Berkeley. She has worked in many settings as a librarian, including medical, special and public libraries. Before changing careers to librarianship, she spent a decade as an epidemiologist at Public Health - Seattle & King County, working both as an analyst doing survey and community assessment work, and answering data requests from researchers, government officials, and the public. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology/Demography, a Master's degree in Public Health and a Master's degree in Library and Information Science, all from the University of Washington in Seattle. While her dissertation focused on patterns of fertility and assimilation among immigrant women (using Current Population Survey data), her current research interests include open data, data literacy, and librarian career paths.

Chelsea Goforth is a Senior Data Project Manager with the Project Management and User Support team at ICPSR where she manages the General Archive and openICPSR. She has nearly 15 years of data-related, social science research, and project management experience across several different projects and disciplines. Chelsea is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Virginia and holds a Master's degree in Education Policy and Bachelors' degrees in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Michigan. Previously, she worked as a Statistical Consultant for the University of Virginia StatLab, as a Research and Evaluation Manager for the ADVANCE Program at the University of Michigan, and as a Research Technician for the Bioethics Program, also at the University of Michigan.

Dara Gold is a data scientist with the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG), a math and computer science research center at Tufts University that studies U.S. redistricting and voting. Prior to working at MGGG, Gold was a mathematician at the RAND Corporation, where she applied mathematical modeling and simulation to a variety of problems. It was also where she became interested in mathematicians' role in combating gerrymandering.

Gold holds a PhD in math from Boston University where she specialized in differential geometry and a BS from Georgetown University. Her work has been published in Election Law Journal, the Journal of Astronautical Sciences and by the RAND Corporation.

Andrew Gottesman is Chief Executive Officer of Gottesman Real Estate Partners, which oversees and adds to his family's commercial property holdings, and Edison Investment Advisors, LLC, the family's investment arm. At Gottesman Real Estate, Mr. Gottesman is primarily responsible for setting strategic direction and overseeing the acquisition and management process. The firm owns a portfolio of commercial properties in New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York.

Mr. Gottesman also is responsible for leasing and building operations at 1120 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The 750,000-square-foot property, known as The Hippodrome Building, includes nearly 600,000 square feet of premier office space, one of midtown's best-known parking garages, high-end retail space and suites catering to small-space users. The building is owned in partnership with Edison Properties, LLC, which Harold Gottesman, Andrew's father, co-founded in 1956. Andrew Gottesman played a central role in the building's 2004-2005 repositioning to a Class A office building from Class B; the project included a complete upgrade of both aesthetics and systems, as well as significant re-tenanting.

EIA, where Mr. Gottesman began working in 2000, otherwise serves as a diversified investment manager for the Gottesman family, specializing in fixed-income securities and equity investments. EIA also coordinates tax, insurance and other wealth management issues for the family.

Mr. Gottesman previously worked for eight years as a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune. He earned a bachelor's degree with distinction at the University of Michigan in 1992 and an MBA with high honors at the University of Chicago in 2000. He is a 1988 graduate of The Pingry School in Martinsville, N.J.

Mr. Gottesman is a member of the Real Estate Board of New York and vice president of the executive committee of the Avenue of the Americas Association. He is a past member of the Board of the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan.

Mr. Gottesman is a resident of Summit, N.J. He and his wife, Christine, an ERISA attorney, have two sons, Joseph, 18, a rising freshman at the University of Chicago, and Benjamin, 16.

Mark Hansen is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Director of the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation. His special interest is the intersection of data, art, and technology. He adopts an interdisciplinary approach to data science, drawing on various branches of applied mathematics, information theory, and new media arts. Hansen is also a current member of the ICPSR Council. Within the field of journalism, Hansen has promoted coding literacy for journalists.

Lynette Hoelter is an associate archivist and director of instructional resources at ICPSR. She is involved in projects related to quantitative reasoning and statistical literacy, especially within the undergraduate social science curriculum, as well as in projects that contribute to social science data infrastructure. Lynette has taught statistics and research methods/survey research in the departments of sociology and urban and regional planning, as well as in the Institute for Social Research's Summer Program in Survey Methodology and ICPSR's Summer Program, at the University of Michigan and elsewhere.

Professor Hotz specializes in the subjects of applied econometrics, labor economics, economic demography, and economics of the family. His studies have investigated the impacts of social programs, such as welfare-to-work training; the relationship between childbearing patterns and labor force participation of U.S. women; the effects of teenage pregnancy; the child care market; the Earned Income Tax Credit; and other such subjects. He began conducting his studies in 1977, and has since published his work extensively in books and leading academic journals. Many of his projects have been funded by grants awarded by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation. He is currently completing a project with Duncan Thomas on, “Preference and Economic Decision-Making” under a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. His recent works also include, “Tax Policy and Low-Wage Labor Markets: New Work on Employment, Effectiveness and Administration” with John Karl Scholz and Charles Mullin; and “Designing New Models to Explain Family Change and Variation” with S. Philip Morgan. Along with his duties as an independent researcher, Professor Hotz has also held positions as a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the National Poverty Center, the Institute for the Study of Labor, and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He is presently a member of the Committee on National Statistics for the National Academy of Sciences’ Research Council.

Mr. Kamdar is the Statistician Expert and managing statistician for projects in the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI), Data and Methods Hub, at the University of Michigan. His primary focus of research is pertaining to health services research for individuals with disabilities, women's health outcomes, surgical outcomes, geriatrics, and emergency medicine with significant experience and has published using large administrative claims datasets such as Medicare, Optum Clinformatics, and Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) as well as electronic health records. Mr. Kamdar serves as a co-investigator with Dr. Mahmoudi on the preventative care RRTC project as well as several other sub-projects for the grant providing analytic expertise and leadership regarding study design leveraging administrative claims. Email: neilseal@med.umich.edu.

Dory Knight-Ingram is a Content Manager on ICPSR's Membership and Communications team. A former newspaper journalist, she skilled in breaking news, social media management, writing, editing, design, photography, video production, and more.

Sherrie A. Kossoudji is presently an associate professor in the School of Social Work and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Economics. Her principal research area is immigration. She has written numerous articles on the legal status of immigrant workers in the United States and the incentives to cross the border illegally. Much of her work attempts to discern the link between legal status in the United States and economic outcomes. She has written on wealth disparities for immigrants--in particular, on home ownership as assets for immigrants. Her latest immigration work focuses on new immigrant children to the United States, particularly adopted orphans from abroad, and on the economic incentives and consequences of citizenship for immigrants to the United States. Recently, she has examined markets for body parts around the world. In particular, markets for sperm and ova are useful to identify social constructions of desirability and the price associated with them. She has also written on numerous labor and wealth issues and gendered outcomes. Much of her work focuses on gendered differences in economic outcomes for those at the margins of society. Dr. Kossoudji speaks publicly around the world about immigration, citizenship, and life sciences and reproduction.

An economist, Levenstein first joined ISR's Survey Research Center (SRC) in 2003 as the executive director of the Michigan Census Research Data Center (MCRDC), a joint project with the U.S. Census Bureau. She has taken an active role at ISR, joining the Director's Advisory Committee on Diversity in 2009 and serving as the chair of ISR's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategic planning committee and as the liaison to the larger university program.

Additionally, Levenstein is associate chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and past president of the Business History Conference.

Levenstein received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include industrial organization, competition policy, business history, data confidentiality protection, and the improvement of economic statistics.

Dr. Arthur Lupia is the University of Michigan's Gerald R Ford Distinguished University Professor and is Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation, where he leads NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. He also serves as co-chair of the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Open Science. Dr. Lupia's research and related public work examines processes, principles, and factors that guide decision-making and learning. His efforts clarify how people make decisions, and choose what to believe, when they face adverse circumstances. Lupia draws from many scientific disciplines to advance these topics. Dr. Lupia has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and is a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research. He previously served as a Principal Investigator of the American National Election Studies and as Chairman of the Board of the Center for Open Science. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Rochester and a social science PhD at the California Institute of Technology.

Dr. Mahmoudi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Department of Family Medicine. She maintains keen interest in health-related quality of life and economic outcomes. Her research interests and extensive expertise include health and healthcare disparities, health economics, disability, economics of aging, and cost-effectiveness analysis. She brings expertise in study design for research activities and data analyses related to administrative claims datasets including Medicare, Medicaid, and private payers. She is the principle investigator for the RRTC project entitled, "Effect of variation in health coverage, employment, and community resources on adverse events and healthcare costs and utilization" focusing on preventative care services. Dr. Mahmoudi continues to provide strategic direction, leadership, and subject matter expertise over all research activities related to this very important disabilities research project. Email: mahmoudi@med.umich.edu

Josh Meisel is a co-director of the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research (HIIMR) and has almost 10 years of research experience in the cannabis science and policy arenas. Dr. Meisel's research interests are centered on examining the intended and unintended consequences of policy shifts from prohibition to post-prohibition cannabis control contexts. This includes media representations of cannabis culture and industry, college student involvement in the cannabis economy, and current work focusing on adverse reactions to cannabis edibles and Mexican drug cartel involvement in California cannabis cultivation.

Robert Melendez, Geospatial Data Specialist, is a data analyst who has expertise in the data we use in order to understand neighborhood context. For example, he takes all of the data from the US Census to create measures of neighborhood poverty, affluence, and segregation.

Lisa R. Merriweather is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She received her PhD in Adult Education with a graduate certificate in Qualitative Inquiry from the University of Georgia. She is the co-founder and co-senior editor of Dialogues in Social Justice: An Adult Education Journal. Her research focuses on issues of equity and social justice within the historical discourse of adult education, informal education, and doctoral education. She explores the critical philosophy and sociology of race and anti-Black racism and employs Africana Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and qualitative and historical methodology to investigate topics found at the nexus of race and adult education.

Elizabeth Moss has overall responsibility for managing and growing the ICPSR Bibliography of Data-related Literature, a searchable database of nearly 100,000 citations to publications that analyze or significantly discuss data archived at ICPSR. Free to the public, it was developed 20 years ago with funding from the National Science Foundation (SES-9977984) and is now supported by archives and projects housed at ICPSR. It represents nearly 60 years of scholarship in the quantitative social sciences.

Part of ICPSR's Metadata and Preservation unit, Elizabeth oversees the work of three staff members who scour the social and behavioral science literature looking for data use and then making the valuable linkages between publications and the underlying data. Elizabeth actively promotes the use of best practice in research data citation, in order to give credit to data creators, to enable data access and reuse, and to track that reuse to measure impact. She earned her MS from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College (now Simmons University) in Boston.

Whitney Ogle earned her Masters in Exercise Physiology, Doctorate of Physical Therapy, and Doctorate in Human Performance - Motor Learning & Control. Dr. Ogle has been investigating the role of cannabis in exercise and physical therapy. Dr. Ogle collaborates with other professors in HIIMR and with DPT professors to broaden our understanding of cannabis use in a variety of populations. Dr. Ogle is also a board member of HIIMR and operates our Instagram account @hsuhiimr.

As the IRIS Executive Director, Jason manages the activities of IRIS and is the liaison with future and current Member Institutions. He is an ex officio member of the IRIS Board of Directors. Together with collaborators, Jason works on projects that examine the dynamics of high-technology industries, the public value of the research university, and the network organization of surgical care. Jason's work makes use of large-scale administrative data to study fundamental process of network change and their effects in policy relevant domains.

Allison Plyer is Chief Demographer. Dr. Plyer is co-author of The New Orleans Prosperity Index which examines the extent to which economic outcomes have improved for black New Orleanians since the end of the Civil Rights era. She is also author of The New Orleans Index series, developed in collaboration with the Brookings Institution to analyze the state of the New Orleans recovery and later to track the region’s progress toward prosperity. She served as an editor for the Brookings Institution Press volume entitled “Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita.” Allison is recognized as an international expert in post–Katrina demographics and disaster recovery trends. Allison spearheaded the City of New Orleans’ challenge to the Census Bureau’s 2007 and 2008 population estimate, resulting in an upward revision of nearly 75,000 to the Bureau’s estimate of the city’s population — ultimately bringing the estimate for New Orleans within 6 percent of the 2010 Census count. She frequently provides commentary on regional recovery and development to local and national media such as Fox8 television, WBOK radio, the New Orleans Times Picayune, NPR, the Associated Press, and the New York Times.

Allison joined The Data Center in 2001 with 8 years experience developing the management capacity of nonprofit and micro–enterprise organizations in New Orleans, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Guatemala. Additionally, she has almost a decade of experience in the for–profit sector as a marketing and data mining consultant to large and small companies including AT&T, Barnes and Noble, Lexus, and Inc. Magazine. Allison received her Doctorate in Science from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine with a dissertation entitled “An analysis of administrative data for measuring population displacement and resettlement following a catastrophic U.S. event.” She has an MBA in marketing and organizational behavior from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, a BA in religious studies and Spanish from Vanderbilt University, magna cum laude, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Plyer is Chair of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and she is a Life Fellow of the Louisiana Effective Leadership Program.

Nathaniel Porter is Assistant Professor and Data Education Coordinator & Social Science Data Consultant in the Virginia Tech University Libraries. He provides consultation and training on study design, data management and coding and analysis tools for students and researchers of all disciplines using qualitative data, surveys, and other social science tools. He was recognized in 2019 with the Best Practice Award from Virginia Tech's Professional Development Network and serves as institutional representative to ICPSR, QDR and Roper Center. His research focuses on making data accessible to non-specialists by documenting open and effective practices in crowdsourcing, survey experiments and other data collection, analysis and pedagogical techniques.

Dr. Nancy Potok is the CEO of NAPx Consulting.  She formerly was the Chief Statistician of the United States, co-chairing the Federal Data Strategy and serving as a Commissioner on the bipartisan Commission for Evidence-Based Policy Making.  She previously served as Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Census Bureau; Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce; Senior VP for Economic, Labor, and Population Studies at NORC at the University of Chicago; and Chief Operating Officer at McManis & Monsalve Associates, a business analytics and organizational transformation consulting firm. Dr. Potok has been an adjunct professor at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. She is the recipient of the Presidential Rank Award, the Secretary of Commerce Gold Medal and Silver Medals, Risk Manager of the Year Award, Federal 100 Award, and the Arthur S. Flemming Award. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, Column Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review, and on the Board of Visitors for the Computing and Information Science School at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her Ph.D. at The George Washington University.

Amy Mehraban Pienta is a Research Scientist at ICPSR and directs the Business and Collection Development unit. She is also a research affiliate of the University of Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging and the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Pienta has studied women's retirement behavior, the joint retirement behavior of married couples, and the relationship between various social statuses and health. She directs the National Addiction and HIV Data Archive Program funded by NIDA, the Health & Medical Care Archive funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and is developing a data repository for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Jacob Alden Sargent is Associate Director for Instruction and Research for the Center for Digital Liberal Arts and has been affiliated faculty in the Cultural Studies Program. Jacob earned his BA in Music and Sociology from Bates College and his PhD in Sociology from the University of Virginia where he published articles on labor and technology in knowledge and culture industries. He brings a background in sociology and faculty development to Oxy where he manages instructional and co-curricular programs for information literacy in the context of institutional transformation. He most recently taught courses on the history of liberal arts education, where students did hands-on research in the college archive, and on gender identities, where students critically examined what it means to quantify human identities and behaviors.

Anna is the Membership Experience Manager at ICPSR, supporting 700+ member institutions who are using data to make an impact on real life. Her role is to help members with any questions that arise, to help Official and Designated Representatives connect with each other, and to help share the incredible work being done with ICPSR data. Anna's previous experience includes the American Red Cross and UCLA. She received her BA from California State University, Northridge and her MA in Social Entrepreneurship and Change from Pepperdine University.

Ronnie Swartz has consulted with young people, families, adults, and organizations in education, healthcare, behavioral health, substance abuse, juvenile justice, child welfare, and advocacy systems. Dr. Swartz current research, teaching, writing, and practice includes narrative therapy and community work, harm reduction in relation to problematic drug use and drug policy, social/economic policy, values, ethics, and the cultivation of love, kindness, and care skills in social work practice. Dr. Swartz served as the Chair of the Department of Social Work from 2009-2018 and has been the Director of the Altruistic Behavior Institute since 2010.

Lloyd Talley is a mixed-methods developmental psychologist and interdisciplinary social policy researcher. He focuses on the intersections of social and life course identity development as a lens for meaning-making and in the prediction of educational, behavioral, and mental health outcomes. He received his PhD in applied psychology and human development and Master of Science in Education from the University of Pennsylvania and his BA in communication and culture from Howard University. Overall, he seeks to develop complex models of human behavior which highlight the central role of identity development and socialization processes in behavioral patterns and social outcomes. Recently, Talley has focused on exploring the within-group diversity of Black populations by developing profiles of identity (racial, gender, religious) and examining their relationship to patterns in social and health outcomes.

David Thomas is a senior data project manager at ICPSR. He has been with ICPSR since 2003 and has held various positions across the curation and project management teams. He has been with the Resource Center for Minority Data (RCMD) since 2007 as the archive/project manager. RCMD is an archive whose mission is to acquire, disseminate, and promote data on underrepresented populations. While its initial focus was on underrepresented populations by race and ethnicity, that focus has expanded to include underrepresented gender identity and sexual orientation.

John H. Thompson is a Distinguished Institute Fellow with the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative at the University of Virginia. He also is currently an independent consultant with a focus on survey methodology, executive leadership, the Federal Statistical System, and decennial census. Thompson was director of the U.S. Census Bureau, and most recently, the Executive Director of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, an organization whose focus is to advocate for the production and use of high-quality statistics to support good governance and economic growth. Thompson is nationally recognized for his innovative leadership, significant impact on government and academic research, and vision to advance excellence in federal statistics and modernize the federal statistical system.

Thompson spent close to 10 years in two separate, distinctive executive leadership positions with the U.S. Census Bureau. From 1997 to 2002, he was the senior career executive responsible for all aspects of the 2000 Decennial Census and spearheaded the transformation of large-scale complex surveys through innovation. As the executive leader of the 2000 Decennial Census, the U.S. government’s largest peacetime mobilization, he managed a budget of $6.5 billion and a workforce of more than 500,000 people. He received accolades for his outstanding work from the National Academy of Sciences Panel evaluating the census, among others. From 2013 to 2017, Thompson was the director of the Census Bureau where he successfully worked with the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, including the White House and Congress, to transform the Bureau into a forward-looking 21st century statistical agency. His accomplishments include a redesign of the 2020 Decennial Census to achieve great efficiencies through the use of modern geospatial tools, the Internet, and mobile technology; and implementation of a research program to support mission critical activities – both of which have had a profound impact on the federal statistical system.

Thompson was President and Executive Vice President of the (National Opinion Research Center) NORC at the University of Chicago, a national nonprofit organization that conducts high-quality social science research in the public interest. Between 2002 and 2012, he led the organization to nearly 50 percent growth in revenue, implemented new initiatives to improve and advance federal statistics, and oversaw major research projects, including the National Immunization Survey conducted on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thompson is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, a member of the 2013 Virginia Tech College of Science Hall of Distinction inaugural class, and received the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Executive in 2001. The Department of Commerce recognized his cumulative impact on federal statistics with the bronze medal in 1988, silver medal in 1998, and gold medal in 2000.

Katherine Wallman served as chief statistician at the United States for 25 years, retiring at the end of 2016. She provided policy oversight, established priorities, advanced long-term improvements, and set standards for a federal statistical establishment that comprises more than 100 agencies spread across every cabinet department. Wallman represented the US government in international statistical organizations, including the United Nations and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. During her tenure, Wallman has increased collaboration among the agencies of the US statistical system, fostered improvements in the scope and quality of the nation’s official statistics, strengthened protections for confidential statistical information, and initiated changes that have made the products of the system more accessible and usable.

Michael Traugott is a political scientist who studies campaigns and elections, political communication, and the role of polls in the making of news. He is Research Professor Emeritus in the Center for Political Studies and Director of the ICPSR Summer Program.

Brady T. West is a Research Associate Professor in the Survey Methodology Program, located within the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (U-M) campus. He earned his PhD from the Michigan Program in Survey Methodology in 2011. Before that, he received an MA in Applied Statistics from the U-M Statistics Department in 2002, being recognized as an Outstanding First-year Applied Masters student, and a BS in Statistics with Highest Honors and Highest Distinction from the U-M Statistics Department in 2001. His current research interests include the implications of measurement error in auxiliary variables and survey paradata for survey estimation, survey nonresponse, interviewer effects, and multilevel regression models for clustered and longitudinal data. He is the lead author of a book comparing different statistical software packages in terms of their mixed-effects modeling procedures (Linear Mixed Models: A Practical Guide using Statistical Software, Second Edition, Chapman Hall/CRC Press, 2014), and he is a co-author of a second book entitled Applied Survey Data Analysis (with Steven Heeringa and Pat Berglund), the second edition of which was published by Chapman Hill in June 2017. https://psm.isr.umich.edu/west