News & Events

In this lecture, Esther Duflo will share her experience working in collaboration with policymakers in the developing world, and highlight the critical role of bringing a “plumbing” mindset to policy-relevant research: a mindset where policymakers realize that any program has so many dimensions that it is very difficult to get them all right, and where there is a need for constant experimentation and tinkering for policies to reach their full potential.

The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce the 2024 cohort of fellows for its African Peacebuilding Network (APN) and Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (Next Gen) program. This year, the APN awarded 17 scholars with Individual Research Fellowships, and Next Gen awarded 34 scholars with Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships.

The Mercury Project, together with the University of Nairobi’s Institute for Development Studies, welcomes leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic communities to the Mercury Project Solutions Summit in Nairobi from October 3-4. We welcome colleagues from around the world to join us online for the opening plenary, at which representatives from the research, policy, and philanthropic communities will frame both the challenges and the opportunities for evidence-based strategies that build robust vaccine demand chains and support science-based health decision-making.

The SSRC and the Japan Foundation New York have awarded new research grants to three Abe Fellows leading cross-disciplinary, cross-national research teams working on better understanding important social issues. The projects address data governance in the context of urban innovation, legal and cultural understandings of sexual consent, and resiliency in food production systems.

The Social Science Research Council recently launched a series of new Agenda Fund initiatives focused on accelerating public innovation, or the discovery and implementation of more effective ways of delivering public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, growth-oriented infrastructure, and scientific and technological innovation. In this President’s Desk essay, SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on how emerging research on the determinants of innovation in governments and universities can help us design, test, and implement evidence-based strategies that accelerate public innovation.

In this Research to Solve Problems lecture, Duncan J. Watts (University of Pennsylvania) will explore some of the challenges faced by social and behavioral scientists in reconciling conflicting findings, or findings from studies conducted in different contexts, and consider whether those challenges are rooted in the traditional approach to the research process. He will outline an alternative approach, “integrative experimental design,” which puts generalizability considerations first in the process of experimental design, and illustrate this approach using an example from research on teams.

The SSRC today launched a new initiative offering a financial and administrative home to projects incubated outside the Council. Through fiscal sponsorship, the Council can provide individuals and teams with tax-exempt status, efficient and responsive financial and administrative staff, deep expertise in grant and contract management, and extensive relationships with philanthropic and public funders.

In this post, SSRC Mercury Project researchers Anwesha Bhattacharya (Harvard Kennedy School), Erik Jorgensen (Inclusion Economics at Yale University), Urvi Naik (Inclusion Economics India Centre), and Charity Troyer Moore (Inclusion Economics at Yale University) discuss the challenges to pursuing research on susceptibility to inaccurate information in lower-income populations.

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 Social Science Research Council announces the launch of its newest program, the AI Disclosures Project, led by noted technology innovator Tim O’Reilly and economist Ilan Strauss. The AI Disclosures Project will focus on developing best practices for firms’ disclosures about their uses of AI models, ensuring that stakeholders have access to consistent, accurate, and transparent information about how AI models are being developed and deployed.