News & Events

Virtual Lecture | May 22, 2:00 PM Eastern, via Zoom
Researchers often pursue ideas because they are novel and innovative. Breaking new ground is clearly important, and being "first" can help a paper get published. But the drive to be new can also push researchers away from the kinds of iterative research questions that help decision-makers implement effective policy (and towards surprising results that can be hard to replicate). This talk will tell the story of a policy-research partnership that started with a new and surprising finding—that summer jobs programs don't actually help future youth employment, but do reduce violence—then kept iterating to explore how, why, and for whom. The result highlights what can come from repeated evaluation: an evidence base that is more convincing, illuminating, and practical than any single study can be.

The Social Science Research Council welcomes American University and Stony Brook University to the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, joining more than 50 North American institutions of higher education (and more than 90 campuses) dedicated to connecting across disciplines and institutions to support impactful social and behavioral science that produces new knowledge and advances the common good.

Virtual Lecture | April 24, 3:00 PM Eastern, via Zoom
What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong? In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. This seminar describes how and why everyone’s conventional wisdom about gun violence is at best incomplete, how behavioral economics gives us a better way to understand the problem, and how a sustained partnership between the University of Chicago Crime Lab and the city of Chicago have helped identify and scale new solutions.

The AI Disclosures Project today released findings from a new working paper, “Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data: Non-public book content in OpenAI’s Models,” investigating the use of non-public, copyrighted content in LLM model training. The research team used the DE-COP membership inference attack method to analyze 34 copyrighted O’Reilly Media books to assess whether OpenAI's models were trained on content that required payment or authorization to access.

On June 2, 2025, the Social Science Research Council will convene leaders of pioneering research labs from across the country who are working in partnership with health providers to re-engineer provider and patient decision-making environments to improve health outcomes. Researchers will share emerging findings as well as high-value opportunities for decision-making interventions to improve patient health. The symposium will provide a roadmap for health research funders to help guide new investments in health decision-making research. Registration is open now.

Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.

The SSRC is pleased to announce that Marc Feigen has joined its Board of Directors. Feigen is the founder and CEO of Feigen Advisors, LLC, which provides decision support to CEOs in strategy and value creation, capital management, governance, investor relations, stakeholder loyalty, and leadership. Marc co-founded Cambridge in America, an organization that has raised over $1 billion for Cambridge, and has been the organization’s executive Vice Chairman for 24 years.

On June 2, 2025, the Social Science Research Council will convene leaders of pioneering research labs from across the country who are working in partnership with health providers to re-engineer provider and patient decision-making environments to improve health outcomes. Researchers will share emerging findings as well as high-value opportunities for decision-making interventions to improve patient health. The symposium will provide a roadmap for health research funders to help guide new investments in health decision-making research. Registration is open now.

The SSRC is excited to announce the appointment of Olivia Blackmon as our inaugural Vice President of Innovation. Olivia, who holds a PhD in sociology from George Mason University, joins us from Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), where she built and led ORAU’s STEM Accelerator. We look forward to her work building new initiatives that connect the social and behavioral science research community to public, private, and nonprofit partners, improving the capacity of our communities to support human flourishing.