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 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.
In this essay, Rutgers University professor Charles Senteio describes how his research has been enhanced by the “invisible benefits” of participation in the SSRC’s global Mercury Project research consortium. He illustrates how funders’ choices in structuring collaborative work–within and across teams–create value beyond the direct funding of research projects, enabling new ideas and collaborations that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.
The SSRC welcomes two new members to its Board of Directors. Ronnie Chatterji is the Mark Burgess and Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor of Business and Public Policy at Duke University, and has served as a senior advisor in the White House and as Chief Economist in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Sherry Glied is Dean of New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and Professor of Public Service, and has served at senior levels in the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services.
