ICPSR Governing Council Members

Each fall after the ICPSR Biennial Meeting, six members are approved by the membership to serve four-year terms on the ICPSR Council, joining six ongoing members. A Council Chair is also approved at this time. Below is a list of current ICPSR Council members, and a list of previous Councils is also available.

ICPSR Governing Documents

ICPSR's governing documents include a constitution, bylaws, and a memorandum of agreement with the University of Michigan.

Current ICPSR Council Members

Biographies

Randall Akee is a Nonresident Fellow with the Economic Studies program at Brookings. He was a David M. Rubenstein Fellow with the Economic Studies program from 2017-2019. He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Public Policy and American Indian Studies. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in June 2006. Randall Akee is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Labor Studies and the Children's Groups. In addition, he is a research fellow at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a faculty affiliate at the UCLA California Center for Population Research (CCPR) at UCLA and a faculty affiliate at UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). His main research interests are Labor Economics, Economic Development and Migration.

Courtney Bell serves as the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. A former high school science teacher, Courtney earned her doctorate at Michigan State University in Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy and a BA in Chemistry at Dartmouth College. Courtney is passionate about understanding and improving teaching for historically underserved children. Her interdisciplinary collaborative work is situated at the intersections of research, policy, and practice. It spans issues of parental choice, performance assessments of teaching, international comparisons of teaching, teaching quality, teacher learning, teacher education, and the measurement of teaching. Courtney led the international development of two observation systems and served as a PI on the OECD-organized TALIS Video Study (also called the Global Teaching InSights study). She is currently engaged in both national and international studies of teaching, teacher education, and teacher learning.

Claire McKay Bowen is a principal research associate in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population and leads the Statistical Methods Group at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on developing and assessing the quality of data privacy and confidentiality methods and improving science communication. In 2021, the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies identified her as an emerging leader in statistics for her technical contributions and leadership to statistics and the field of data privacy and confidentiality. She is a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and other data governance and privacy committees, as well as an adjunct professor at Stonehill College. Bowen holds an honors BS in mathematics and physics from Idaho State University and an MS and PhD in statistics from the University of Notre Dame. After completing her PhD, she worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she investigated cosmic ray effects on supercomputers.

Michael Cafarella is a Principal Research Scientist in the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. Michael's research group conducts research on all areas of database systems and information management.

Jon E. Cawthorne is dean of the Wayne State University Library System and the University's School of Information Sciences. Cawthorne began his library leadership career in Detroit, as director of the Detroit Public Library's flagship branch, where he was later named interim deputy director to lead the entire 24-branch system through an organizational transition. Before becoming West Virginia University Libraries dean in 2014, Cawthorne also held leadership positions at Florida State University, Boston College, and San Diego State University. He holds an MLS degree from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in managerial leadership in the information professions from Simmons College. His published research bridges the realms of diversity, libraries, organizational culture, and leadership; with a shared focus on models that anticipate and plan for rapid change and the future through strategic capacity building and workforce development.

Susan Frazier-Kouassi is the Director of the Texas Juvenile Crime Prevention Center, The College of Juvenile Justice & Psychology at Prairie View A&M University. Susan's research areas of interest focus on the social determinants of health, especially obesity; youth violence and crime prevention; youth empowerment; and community-academic partnerships.

Sandy Marquart-Pyatt is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University, jointly appointed in the Department of Political Science. She earned her PhD at Ohio State University and joined MSU in 2009. She studies nature-society connections, public opinion and behavior, and methodology. Her current work investigates climate change, environmental attitudes and behavior, environmental policy and decision-making, and the spatial distribution of environmental concerns and environmental challenges. Dr. Marquart-Pyatt is the lead investigator of a multi-state, panel survey of agricultural producers in the Upper Midwest of the US. She has methodological interests in structural equation modeling, multilevel/hierarchical modeling, panel models, and survey methodology.

Jeffrey Morenoff is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Research Professor in the Population Studies Center and Survey Research Center. He is also Director of the Population Studies Center in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Professor Morenoff's research interests include neighborhood environments, inequality, crime and criminal justice, the social determinants of health, racial/ethnic/immigrant disparities in health and antisocial behavior, and methods for analyzing multilevel and spatial data. Morenoff's current projects include studies of (1) prisoner reentry in Michigan, (2) neighborhood environments and health in Chicago, (3) neighborhood environments, crime, and antisocial behavior in Medellin, Colombia, (4) change over time in the spatial concentration of poverty, and (5) long-term trajectories of health and mortality in the U.S. In 2004, Morenoff won the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, for "outstanding contributions to the discipline of criminology."

Gisela Sin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. Gisela studies political institutions with an emphasis on the strategic elements of separation of powers. Gisela's research demonstrates the value of taking a broader view when studying the division of decision-making authority: checks and balances create expectations between institutions that can be fully understood only by identifying their strategic interactions.

Janet Stamatel is a sociologist specializing in global criminology, political sociology, and quantitative methods. Stamatel's primary research agenda addresses why countries vary in their levels and types of crime, how we can best measure that variation, and how we can advance criminological theories to account for macro-level crime differences. Stamatel is especially interested in how political regime changes can contribute to or alleviate social disorder problems, such as homicide and violence against women. Most of Stamatel's research focuses on crime in Europe, particularly post-communist Central and Eastern Europe.

Michael Steelworthy, is a Data Librarian; Coordinator, Research Data Services, at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. Steelworthy helps faculty and students find and use socioeconomic data and statistics in their research. As the liaison to Statistics Canada, Steelworthy collects survey microdata, connects researchers with government analysts, and encodes datasets for use. In the classroom, Steelworthy introduces students and faculty to Canadian and international socio-economic data resources and consults on individual and team-based research projects. Steelworthy also manages the Laurier Library's Research Data Management Programme and coordinates the Library's services and tools that help researchers meet their funding obligations for the management and preservation of their data. Steelworthy consults on policy implications and recommends suitable repositories for students and faculty to store their data.
Steelworthy received an MLIS from Dalhousie University in 2010, after studying information policy, governmental information organization and its social implications, and information literacy.

Esther Wilder, Professor of Sociology at Lehman College, City University of New York, received her PhD from Brown University. Her current research focuses on the importance of biomedical and social factors in shaping the experience of disability, factors that promote quantitative literacy skills, and the roles of race/ethnicity and religion in explaining demographic and economic outcomes. Wilder also looks at trends and patterns in scholarly publishing and access to the scholarly literature of demography and gerontology. She is especially interested in understanding the ways in which physical and social factors influence health and well-being. Wilder has established and directed a variety of faculty development programs both at Lehman and across CUNY to infuse quantitative reasoning (QR) across the curriculum. She is active in a variety of initiatives to promote STEM education and improve students' critical thinking and writing skills.

Future meetings

2024

• April 11-12 (Perry Building)
  New Council Orientation April 10
• October 3-4 (Perry Building)

2025

• April 17-18 (Perry Building)
• October 15 (Perry Building)^*
  OR meeting is October 16-17

2026

• April 16-17 (Perry Building)
  New Council Orientation April 15
• October 1-2 (Perry Building)^*

2027

• April 15-16 (Perry Building)
• October 6 (Perry Building)^*
  OR meeting is October 7-8

^* Dates may change due to UM Football Schedule

Minutes

View the Council minutes dating back to 1995.