Mercury Project Findings: SMS-based Interventions

Over the course of the past three years, the Social Science Research Council’s Mercury Project has supported 18 research teams around the globe in evaluating interventions designed to increase vaccination and other evidence-based health behaviors. We are excited to now present the many policy-relevant and actionable insights from their projects.

This month, we share the findings of Boosting Boosters at Scale and Intention2Action, two Mercury Project teams that used SMS-based interventions to encourage Americans to get Covid-19 boosters.

Strengthening Pathways: a National Conversation about Health Research

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

Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science – April 2025

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.

Social Science Research Council Welcomes Marc Feigen to its Board of Directors

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

Introducing the SSRC’s new Vice President of Innovation

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.

New Opportunity: SSRC Postdoctoral Fellow

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.

Launching the Policy ROI Project

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

Introducing the 2025 College and University Fund Lecture Series: Delivering on Government Innovation

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.

Social Science Research Council Welcomes Ingela Alger to its Board of Directors

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.

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