News & Events

April 18th, 2024 | 2:00 PM Eastern
In this installment of our Research to Solve Problems lecture series, Donald Moynihan (Georgetown University) will discuss how social and behavioral scientists interested in the applied study of public services can think about ways for their research to have an impact. Professor Moynihan will draw from his experience studying government processes to discuss the purposeful framing of public problems, and how researchers can design solutions of interest to policymakers.

The SSRC has been asked to join the UN’s new scientific advisory network, sharing insights into how the social and behavioral sciences might contribute to more effective science and technology policy. In this post, SSRC President Anna Harvey shares the SSRC’s initial contributions on the UN’s priority issues of artificial intelligence, climate change, and biotechnology.

The Social Science Research Council and Arnold Ventures are pleased to announce the appointment of six Criminal Justice Innovation Fellows. The postdoctoral fellows will pursue policy-relevant causal research on interventions with the potential to increase the equity and efficacy of criminal justice practices, as well as support the Arnold Ventures Criminal Justice team in its research and policy work.

The SSRC Jail Data Initiative, collecting daily person-level jail data in approximately 1,300 counties, welcomes the inaugural Jail Data Initiative postdoctoral fellow. The JDI fellow will use frontier causal inference methods to analyze the impacts of recently enacted criminal justice policies on jail incarceration and community safety, leveraging the JDI’s over 10 million booking records to discover new policy-relevant insights.

The Mercury Project’s 18-team global research consortium is preparing to report findings and launch the next phase of its work. At an upcoming Solutions Summit in Nairobi, researchers and global health policy leaders will identify the most promising interventions to increase vaccine demand from the Mercury Project’s first phase of work, and will develop master protocol blueprints to evaluate those interventions across multiple diverse settings.

With support from Arnold Ventures, the Jail Data Initiative collects daily person-level jail records in over 1,300 counties to enable the research and policy communities to better understand the causes and consequences of jail incarceration. A joint project of the Social Science Research Council and New York University’s Public Safety Lab, the Jail Data Initiative’s dashboard and downloadable data allow researchers to identify policies that can safely reduce jail incarceration.

Researchers Fortunate Machingura and Leslie Nyoni explain how they are leading the Zimbabwe arm of a four-country study (that also includes Cote d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Senegal) to equip frontline health workers with new skills in empathetic personal communication and evaluate the impacts on vaccine uptake and trust.

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, the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), and the Ohio Education Research Center (OERC) are pleased to welcome a new University Advisory Board to the Industries of Ideas project. Representatives from 35 universities nationwide have joined our National Science Foundation-supported collaboration to map the economic impacts of federal investments in university-based research in emerging technologies. The advisory board will provide critical input into a prototype data infrastructure linking person-level university grant data with state workforce data for the fields of AI and electric vehicle research. The board’s input will help ensure that the prototype is responsive to the needs of universities and can be scaled to other states, universities, and research areas.