News & Events

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.

The SSRC seeks a postdoctoral fellow to join a research team aimed at producing estimates of the Marginal Value of Public Funds for a set of programs related to criminal justice policy. The team will be led by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon and will have access to analyst support. The policies and programs of interest include summer youth employment, cognitive behavioral therapy programs, and potentially others.

The SSRC announces the launch of its newest initiative, the Policy ROI Project. The Policy ROI Project will produce rigorous and reliable measures of the net social returns for groups of alternative criminal justice policies, like summer youth employment programs and cognitive behavioral therapy programs. The project team will produce estimates of each policy’s Marginal Value of Public Funds, a measure that reports the net social benefit produced by each additional dollar of public funds spent on a given policy.

In this President’s Desk post, cross-posted from the Good Science Project, SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on the meaning of “government efficiency” and better and worse strategies to increase government efficiency.

The inaugural lecture in the Council’s 2025 lecture series on government innovation will cover Professor Lawrence Katz’s pathbreaking work with federal and local housing agencies to learn how public housing policy might more effectively support economic opportunity. This lecture will discuss three landmark projects: Moving to Opportunity, enabling residents of public housing to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods; Creating Moves to Opportunity, providing additional support to families considering leaving high-poverty neighborhoods; and HOPE VI revitalization grants, investing in mixed-income developments in neighborhoods with distressed public housing.

A renewed focus on government efficiency has drawn increased attention to the critically important public goods and services provided by federal, state and local governments. Many government agencies lack the capacity to innovate, test, and implement more cost-effective ways to achieve their goals. In this lecture series, we’ll hear about successful research collaborations between federal, state, and local government agencies and faculty with the campuses in the Council’s university consortium.

The SSRC is pleased to announce that Ingela Alger has joined its Board of Directors. Ingela Alger is a CNRS Senior Researcher (DR1) at the Toulouse School of Economics. Her research, which has been published in journals such as American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, focuses on the evolutionary foundations of human preferences, when these are transmitted from generation to generation and are subject to selection.

In December, the SSRC brought together leaders from member institutions of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, along with representatives from public and private research funders, to discuss current opportunities to partner with federal, state, and local agencies to build government capacity to improve the delivery of public goods and services. These opportunities include new sources of funding to build shared administrative data infrastructures and evaluate the impacts of government policies and programs.