Karen Grigorian fills multiple roles at NORC, including Associate Director of the Education and Child Development department, Project Director, and Chair of NORC's Institutional Review Board.
Since joining NORC in 1993, Grigorian has gained extensive experience through her work, which spans the length of NORC's extensive library of social science surveys. She holds leadership responsibilities on many levels, including department administration, project management, department and project budget supervision, client relationships and human subjects' protections review. Currently working as the Project Director on the Survey of Doctorate Recipients sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Grigorian is responsible for all facets of the project, including client management, obtaining Office of Management and Budget clearance, sample design, controlled experiment designs, system architecture, data collection oversight, data products and deliverables such as final reports, and external data users' requests.
In addition to authoring multiple presentations and reports, Grigorian recently co-authored an InfoBrief for the NSF, "Unemployment Among Doctoral Scientists and Engineers Remained Below the National Average in 2008" (2011) and a guideline for the U.S. Department of Education, How to Solicit Rigorous Evaluations of Mathematics and Science Partnerships (MSP) Projects: A User-Friendly Guide for MSP State Coordinators (2005). Earlier in her career with NORC, Grigorian was the Director of the Data Preparation Center. This experience has given her a thorough understanding of the most effective data collection and quality assurance methodologies, which are seamlessly incorporated into her current project protocols.
Grigorian received her undergraduate degree and a secondary teaching certificate from the University of Michigan while working at the Institute for Social Research. Since that time, she has earned a Masters of Project Management.