Social Science Research Council

Lisa Anderson

Chair of the Board

Executive Committee Member

One of the world's leading experts on the Middle East and North Africa, Lisa Anderson is the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University—where she served as dean from 1997 to 2007—and was recently named provost of the American University in Cairo. Before becoming dean she was chair of Columbia's political science department and, still earlier, director of Columbia's Middle East Institute. The author of several books and three dozen scholarly articles on the subjects of state formation and regime change, and on the relationship between the social sciences and public policy, Anderson has served as President of the Middle East Studies Association and member of the Council of the American Political Science Association. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs.

John Seely Brown

Executive Committee Member

John Seely Brown is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at USC and advisor to the provost. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation until April 2002 and also the director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until June 2000—a position he held for twelve years. While head of PARC, Dr. Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, complex adaptive systems, micro electrical mechanical system and NANO technology. His personal research interests include digital culture and rich media, ubiquitous computing, institutional innovation (especially with a focus on Asia) and organizational and individual learning. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals and is co-author of The Social Life of Information (HBS Press, 2000, Paul Duguid, co-author). Dr. Brown serves as a Trustee of The MacArthur Foundation, and on the Boards of Amazon, Corning and Varian Medical Systems.

Lincoln C. Chen

Lincoln C. Chen, MD, is President of the China Medical Board, an independent foundation endowed by the wealth of John D. Rockefeller (senior) and started in 1914 to advance health in China and throughout Asia by strengthening medical education, research, and policies. Prior to joining the Board, he founded and directed the Global Equity Initiative in Harvard University's Asia Center. Dr. Chen is Chair of the Board of Directors for CARE/USA as well as the Global Health Workforce Alliance. He serves the World Health Organization's Director-General as Special Envoy in Human Resources for Health, and is a member of the Secretary-General's Global Advisory Board to the UN Fund for International Partnerships. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the World Academy of Arts and Sciences.

David Coulter

Mr. Coulter is a Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Warburg Pincus, where he focuses on the firm’s financial services practice. Prior to this, Mr. Coulter held a series of senior executive positions at JPMorgan Chase and The Beacon Group, and served as Chairman and CEO of Bank of America Corporation. He is a director of PG&E Corporation, Strayer Corporation, The Irvine Company, Metavante and Aeolus Re. Mr. Coulter also serves on the Boards of the Asia Society, the National Mentoring Partnership, The Fritz Institute, and the Foreign Policy Association.

Michael C. Dawson

Michael Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. Prior to this appointment, Dawson was the founding director of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, and a professor at Harvard University. Over the past decade, he has established a reputation as one of the best survey researchers in the country and the leading authority on political opinion in the African American community. Between 2000 and 2004 Dawson and Lawrence Bobo conducted six public opinion studies on the racial divide in the United States, creating the richest data on this issue that exists. They are a currently working on a book that analyzes this data. His publications include Behind the Mule: Race, Class and African American Politics (Princeton University Press, 1994) and Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Mass Political Ideologies (University of Chicago Press, 2001). He has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Barry Eichengreen

Executive Committee Member

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. In 1997-8 he was senior policy advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and convener of the Bellagio Group of academics and economic officials. He has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). Professor Eichengreen has published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. His recent books include Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods (MIT Press, 2006), and The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Evelynn Hammonds

Evelynn M. Hammonds is Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and became Harvard’s first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity in July 2005. She is the author of Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). She co-edited Gender and Scientific Authority (University of Chicago Press, 1996) with Barbara Laslett, Sally G. Kohl and Helen Longino, and she is completing two new books on the history of race in science and medicine. Dr. Hammonds earned a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University, an S.M. in Physics from MIT, a B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in Physics from Spelman College. She is an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT. Dr. Hammonds serves as a member of the Boards of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Association of American Colleges and Universities, and the Museum of Science, Boston.

William H. Janeway

Executive Committee Member

William H. Janeway is Senior Advisor at Warburg Pincus. Dr. 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. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus in 1988, where he was responsible for building the information technology practice, he was executive vice president and director at Eberstadt Fleming. Dr. Janeway is a director of BEA Systems, Fortent Corp., NYFIX, Inc., O'Reilly Media, Nuance Communications and Wall Street Systems. He is also Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cambridge in America, University of Cambridge and Co-Chair of Cambridge’s 800th Anniversary Capital Campaign, and a Founder Member of the Board of Managers of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF).

Michael D. Kennedy

Treasurer

Executive Committee Member

Michael D. Kennedy is professor of sociology and director of the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies and the Center for European Studies/European Union Center at the University of Michigan. His recent scholarship addresses the relationship between cultural and global transformations through social movements and knowledge systems and practice, evident in these two co-edited volumes: Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics (University of Michigan Scholarly Publishing Office, 2004). His current empirical work focuses on the cultural articulation of democracy, peace, and energy security in Europe and Eurasia. This study builds on his previous work in the sociology of social change in Eastern Europe, with two monographs, Professionals, Power and Solidarity in Poland (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and several edited and co-edited collections. Professor Kennedy has received awards in recognition of his teaching, including the Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award and the University Teaching Award. Poland’s President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, presented Professor Kennedy with the Gold Cross of Merit in 1999 to recognize the contributions he has made to scholarship and education about Poland.

Gilles Kepel

Gilles Kepel is one of the world’s foremost experts on the modern Middle East. He is a professor at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), where he heads the post-graduate program on the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the academic director of the Sciences Po Menton Middle East Mediterranean Undergratuate campus. He was a visiting professor at NYU and at Columbia University in 1995-96. Professor Kepel’s current research interests are religion and politics and contemporary forms of communication. Some of his recent publications include: The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (The Belknap Press, 2004), Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (The Belknap Press, 2002), Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and Europe (Seuil, first published 1994, 2nd edition 1995), and Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharoah (Seuil, first published 1984, revised editions 1993 and 2005).

James Leach

James A. Leach is the Director of the Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Prior to his appointment, Leach taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University where he was John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs. Before joining the Princeton faculty, he served 30 years as a representative in Congress where he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Leach attended Princeton, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics. He holds eight honorary degrees, has received decorations from two foreign governments, and is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edger Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. Leach serves on the board of several public companies and three non-profit organizations – the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly served as a trustee of Princeton University.

Ellen Levy

Ellen Levy is currently a Managing Director at Silicon Valley Connect, a Network Advisor to global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and was recently named Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy for the Internet company Linkedin. She was the Director of Industry Collaboration & Research at Stanford University’s Media X, a program that facilitated collaboration between Stanford scholars and corporate leaders. She continues her work with universities as an Industry Fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship in the School of Engineering, and as a member of the Board of Councilors for USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. Recently, she served as a Deputy Chair in Global Health for the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative. She received her B.S. from the University of Michigan and her M.A./ Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. Her non-profit board activities include Child Family Health International and the Mental Illness and Neuroscience Discovery Institute (2005-2006).

Claudio Lomnitz

Secretary

Claudio Lomnitz is director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and the editor of Public Culture, an interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies published by the Duke University Press. Prior to joining Columbia University, Lomnitz was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School of Social Research and, before that, taught at the University of Chicago and New York University. He is the author of Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (University of California Press, 1992); Death and the Idea of Mexico (The MIT Press, 2005); and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Lomnitz writes a weekly column in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior.

Richard R. Nelson

Richard R. Nelson is George Blumenthal Professor, Emeritus, at Columbia University, and director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Global Development at the Columbia Earth Institute. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1956 from Yale University. From 1956 to 1957 he was an assistant professor at Oberlin College, and from 1968 to 1986 a professor at Yale University. He has also served as an economist at The Rand Corporation (1957-1960, 1963-1968), and a senior member at the Council of Economic Advisors (1961-1963). His research has concentrated on the processes of long-run economic change, with particular emphasis on technological advances and on the evolution of economic institutions. Some of his publications include The Sources of Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 2000), The Sources of Industrial Leadership (Cambridge University Press, 1999), National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1993), An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Harvard University Press; reprint edition, 1982), and many others.

Walter W. Powell

Executive Committee Chair

Walter W. Powell is professor of education and sociology, business, engineering, and communication at Stanford University. He also serves as director of the Scandinavian Consortium on Organizational Research, and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He is also an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. Professor Powell works in the areas of organization theory, economic sociology, and the sociology of science. An author of numerous articles and books, he is most widely known for his contributions to institutional analysis and network studies. He is currently engaged in research on the consequences of the privatization of public science and the development of new forms of distributed innovation.

Claude Steele

Claude Steele is director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the former Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences at Stanford University. Throughout his career he has been interested in how people cope with threats to their self-image. His theory of self-affirmation describes processes for coping with this threat, and his theory of stereotype threat describes how negative group stereotypes can affect important behaviors, such as intellectual performance and intergroup relations. Dr. Steele holds a Ph. D. from The Ohio State University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and Yale University. He is a fellow of the APS and American Psychological Association, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. Dr. Steele is the recipient of a Cattell Fellowship, the Gordon Allport Prize, the William James Fellow Award from the APS, and the Kurt Lewin Prize from the Society for the Scientific Study of Social Issues. He received the Senior Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

Alexander Stille

Alexander Stille is the San Paolo Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is a contributor to The New York Times, La Repubblica, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, and The New Republic. He also is a correspondent for various news publications. Stille has a B.A. from Yale University and an M.S. from Columbia School of Journalism. He is the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for best work of history (1992), Premio Acqui (1992), San Francisco Chronicle Critics Choice Award (1995), and the Alicia Patterson Foundation award for journalism (1996). He is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Picador, 1991), Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (Vintage, 1995), The Future of the Past (Picador, 2002), and The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi (Penguin Press, 2006).

Michael J. Watts

Michael J. Watts is Class of 63 Professor of Geography and Development Studies and Director of the Center for African Studies at University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for thirty years. His work focuses on the intersection between political economy, culture and power. His research has explored gender and household dynamics and irrigation politics in Senegambia, Islam in Nigeria, and the political economy and political ecology of oil. His most recent project is a pictorial history of oil in the Niger Delta, Nigeria.