The Social Science Research Council is pleased to welcome five new members to its Board of Directors: Bruce Carruthers, Johanna Mair, Bill Maurer, Margaret O’Mara, and Edward Walker.

For over a century, leading social and behavioral scientists serving on the Council’s Board have provided a critical connection to the academic research community.

Bruce G. Carruthers is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and a Long-term Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1991 and works in the areas of economic sociology, comparative-historical sociology, and the sociology of law, with research funding from the National Science Foundation, the American Bar Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Tobin Project. He has written numerous articles as well as six books, the most recent published in 2022 by Princeton University Press and entitled The Economy of Promises: Trust, Power, and Credit in America. Carruthers has been a visiting fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. In 2024, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His research spans legal and economic anthropology and has shaped debates on the history of money, Islamic banking, offshore finance, fintech, and the cultural dimensions of economic life. His books include Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law, and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (1997), Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason (2005), and Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States (2006). More recent works include How Would You Like to Pay? How Technology Is Changing the Future of Money (2015), Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (2017), Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design (2018), and the six-volume A Cultural History of Money, from Antiquity to the Modern Age (2023, as general editor). He earned his B.A. at Vassar College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford University.

Johanna Mair is Director of the School of Transnational Governance and Professor of Organizations, Institutions, and Societal Transformation at the European University Institute in Florence. Her research explores how organizations and institutions address pressing societal challenges, with particular attention to democracy, social innovation, and institutional transformation. Over a career spanning Europe and the United States, she has held senior academic positions, including as Professor of Organization, Strategy, and Leadership at the Hertie School in Berlin, and has played a prominent role in shaping debates on inequality, civic engagement, and the organizational underpinnings of democratic life. Her work has received numerous awards and honors, including the 2025 Progress Medal of the Society for Progress, which recognized her pioneering research on social entrepreneurs as architectural innovators who advance well-being, democratic engagement, and sustainability. She holds a PhD in Management from INSEAD.

Margaret O’Mara is a historian of the modern United States and the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair and Professor of American History at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. O’Mara is the author of two acclaimed books on the history of the modern technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (Penn Press, 2015). She is a coauthor of the widely used United States history textbook, The American Pageant (Cengage) and is an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, The American Prospect, and other national and international publications.

Edward Walker is Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. His research focuses on the mobilization and outcomes of advocacy by both social movement organizations and business interests, particularly in the areas of environment and sustainability. Walker’s books and volumes include Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation (NYU Press, 2015), and Organizations and Climate Change (with Bodi Vasi, Emerald, 2026), and his articles appear in outlets including the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Academy of Management Review. A former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Walker’s research has been recognized with the Charles Tilly Award and several other awards from the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA).