Letter from the Director: Memorial Day
Memorial Day: This is a period of transition for all universities, as we collectively say goodbye to the students whose presence provides one of the principal rationales for what we do. At ISERP, many of our graduate fellows did what they were supposed to do, graduate, en route to new jobs at Dartmouth, Oxford, Stanford, Indiana, and elsewhere. This is also a period of transition for ISERP. Leslie Wright, who was here at the beginning, when ISERP was just two people, is moving on, to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It is quite hard for us to imagine what ISERP will be without her, and it is certainly impossible to imagine that ISERP could have become what it is without her dedication, good will, and guiding intelligence. She will continue her involvement with the tobacco project from there, but we will miss her enormously. Leah Lubin moves from administering the rapidly growing QMSS program to the Assistant Directorship. Marlyne Thomas moves from Financial Assistant to Financial Manager. Grace Hong moves from assisting the RWJ H&SS program to running our outreach and communication activities. We welcome here Rachel Young, as Financial Assistant, and Susanna Fisch, as coordinator for the QMSS and RWJ H&SS programs. To add complexity to the transitions, we will reconfigure our central administrative space significantly over the summer. The airport smoking room (aka computer lab) on the 8th floor will be taken down; desks for staff and visitors will occupy the new space. Hopefully by the end of the summer, everyone will have a new work area to go with their new jobs.
The major ISERP-led projects have had successful years. The NSF IGERT program in international development and globalization directed by Joe Stiglitz has completed its first full year. Participants are off to their summer internships and the second cohort has been admitted. The RWJ program in population health has been refunded for another five years, through 2012. The Legacy funded project on the social and economic consequences of tobacco has held one of the two scheduled spring author conferences. Finally, QMSS has matured significantly over the past three years under the direction of Christopher Weiss. Now with more than 30 students enrolled, we are in the process of hiring additional instructional staff in order to mount specialized courses in spatial analysis and multi-level modeling as well as the core statistics and methods courses.
New grants have been awarded to ISERP faculty since we last went to press. Sudhir Venkatesh continues, with Rockefeller funding, his prospective study of the Chicago Housing Authority "overhaul" of public housing and the impact of overhaul on three subgroups of individuals who left public housing after 1999: the "hardest to house" (many still residing in public housing), housing choice voucher holders, and mixed income community residents. Marianthi Markatou will continue her exploration of statistical distances, focusing on the role of distances in the problem of robust model selection. The summer is approaching, and work goes on.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
