Professor Anna Harvey to Lead the Social Science Research Council

Anna Harvey will become the fifteenth president of the Social Science Research Council on July 1. The SSRC is an independent, international research nonprofit organization founded in 1923. It works with practitioners, policymakers, and academic researchers in the social sciences, related professions, and the arts, humanities, and natural sciences.

Professor Harvey is a professor of politics at New York University. She also serves as the founding director of the Public Safety Lab a community-engaged research initiative that draws on the dual lenses of social science and data science to provide insight into mass incarceration and recommendations for improvement of the criminal justice system. Professor Harvey chaired the department of politics at New York University from 2001 to 2004 and was interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 2015 to 2017.

“I am deeply honored to have been asked to lead the SSRC as it approaches its centenary,” said Professor Harvey. “The SSRC was founded to support social science in the public interest, with the ultimate goal of more effective and more equitable public policy. There is much important and hard work to be done to reach that goal, and the SSRC is uniquely positioned to unite the research, policy, and philanthropic communities in the work of understanding how our societies can better support human well-being around the globe. I look forward to contributing to that work.”

Professor Harvey is the author or co-author of several books including A Mere Machine: The Supreme Court, Congress, and American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2013) and Votes Without Leverage: Women in American Electoral Politics, 1920–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Dr. Harvey is a graduate of Ohio University. She earned a Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University in New Jersey.