Senior Fellows

Dan A. Black is a Senior Fellow in NORC's Economic, Labor, and Population Studies department and Professor and Deputy Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He currently serves as the Principal Investigator for the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), 1997 Cohort, and is Co-Project Director of the NLSY program at NORC. More

Norman Bradburn is a Senior Fellow in the Academic Research Centers at NORC. Associated with NORC since 1961, he has been its Director and President of its Board of Trustees. Bradburn's expertise includes survey design, questionnaire design, happiness, and humanities indicators. More​

Henry H. Brownstein is a Senior Fellow in the Substance Abuse, Mental Health and Criminal Justice Studies department at NORC at the University of Chicago. Before becoming a Senior Fellow he was Senior Vice President and Director of the Department from 2005-2011. He has studied and written extensively about drugs and crime, violence, drug markets, crime statistics, qualitative research methods, and the relationship between research and policy. More

Joseph S. Broz is a Senior Fellow in the Security, Energy, and Environment (SEE) department at NORC. He brings 30 years of experience in both the public and private sectors, and deep subject matter expertise in the energy domain, especially in energy technology, gas and oil recovery, alternative fossil production, renewable energy and energy security. His experience also includes significant projects in homeland security, defense, and in the areas of environmental protection and remediation. More

Larry L. Bye is a Senior Fellow in the Public Health Department with NORC at the University of Chicago. Bye has more than 30 years of experience designing and evaluating marketing campaigns and conducting policy and behavioral research. He is also a specialist in survey methods and program evaluation. More

Senior Fellow Kathleen Cagney directs NORC's Population Research Center, which facilitates collaborative population research by economists, sociologists, psychologists, physicians, and other scientists to inform public policy. Cagney's research interests include urban social context, neighborhood effects and health, race and ethnic differences in access to health care and long-term care, life course approaches to research in health, and health status assessment and measurement. More

Cheryl Austein Casnoff is a Senior Fellow in both of NORC's health research departments, Health Care Research and Public Health Research. She has had a distinguished public service career in public health, health financing and health IT. Career highlights include establishing a new Office of Health Information Technology within the Health Resources and Services Administration to promote the adoption and meaningful use of electronic records for safety net providers and creating and implementing the $40 billion State Children's Health Insurance Program. More

​Rupa Datta is a Vice President and Senior Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research at NORC and has led major national surveys, including the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth and the National Survey of Early Care and Education, for more than 15 years. Her expertise includes Study Design and Survey Methodology. More

Jon Gabel is a Senior Fellow with NORC at the University of Chicago in Washington D.C. with more than 35 years of experience.  A nationally recognized expert on private health insurance, he currently manages additional projects on health reform, mental health, and TRICARE.  Gabel is the author of more than 135 articles in scholarly journals including 57 in the influential journal Health Affairs. More

Larry Hedges is a Senior Fellow at NORC and Co-Principal Investigator for the Center for Advancing Research and Communication in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. His research interests include the development of statistical methods for social research, the use of statistical concepts in social and cognitive theory, the demography of talent and academic achievement, and educational policy analysis. More

Jay Himmelstein is Senior Fellow in Health Policy and Research at NORC and a Professor of Family Medicine and Community Health and Internal Medicine at UMass Medical School. He also serves as Chief Health Policy Strategist for UMass Medical School's Center for Health Policy and Research. His professional career in research, policy development and service is dedicated to improving health care and health outcomes for those served by the public sector. More

Thomas B. Hoffer is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Education and Child Development and directs the Joint Center for Education Research. Associated with NORC from 1980-1986 and from 1994 to the present, Hoffer's expertise includes design and analysis of K-12 longitudinal studies, private schooling, accountability in education, doctoral education, and the doctoral science and engineering labor force. More

Carroll Joynes co-founded the Cultural Policy Center at NORC and served as Executive Director for its first ten years. In addition to establishing the CPC in 1999 and overseeing its development, he has served on the majority of its research projects, helping produce a comprehensive map of minority participation in Chicago cultural life, and contributing to Entering Cultural Communities: Diversity and Change in Nonprofit Arts. More

Daniel Kasprzyk is an NORC Senior Fellow and directs NORC's Center for Excellence in Survey Research, a department whose goal is to develop and promote research and development activities within NORC. Kasprzyk's interests are in survey management, education surveys, nonsampling errors in surveys, and unit and item nonresponse adjustment methods. More

Sheila Nataraj Kirby is a Senior Fellow in the Education and Child Development Studies department. Her expertise includes educational policy, teacher education, graduate education, policy evaluation, and military manpower. More

Felicia LeClere is a Senior Fellow in the Public Health Research department. She works as research coordinator on the National Immunization Survey and National Children's Study. LeClere's expertise includes data dissemination, questionnaire design, survey administration, and demography.

Robert T. Michael is a Senior Fellow at NORC and the Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Harris School at the University of Chicago. A rigorous scholar, Michael was the founding dean of the Harris School. More

Wilhelmine Miller is a Senior Fellow in the Health Care Research department, where she advises in the areas of health insurance coverage and payment policy, performance measurement, and delivery system design and evaluation. Miller's expertise includes clinical and cost effectiveness research, population health status measures, and social and environmental determinants of health. More

Christine H. Nye is a Senior Fellow in the Health Care Research department. She leads NORC's Medicaid research activities and is involved in the health information technology, quality, and payment policy areas. Nye's expertise is in health policy, program administration, and qualitative program evaluation. More

​Colm O'Muircheartaigh is a Senior Fellow at NORC and Co-Principal Investigator for the Center for Advancing Research and Communication in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and is Dean of the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago. He is one of the world's most forward-thinking statisticians, with special interests in survey research methodology, sample and questionnaire design and analysis, response and nonresponse error, and data quality. More

Stephen Raudenbush is a Senior Fellow in the Joint Center for Education Research at NORC at the University of Chicago. Raudenbush is a leading scholar on quantitative methods for studying child and youth development within social settings such as classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods. He is best known for his work on developing hierarchical linear models, with broad applications in the design and analysis of longitudinal and multilevel research. More

Patricia Ruggles has worked throughout her career to improve the quality of the economic and social statistics used for research and policy analysis. She has been involved in the development of methods for analyzing longitudinal data sets since the 1980s, when she was a researcher at the Urban Institute. She was an early user of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), using it to create integrated longitudinal files for the analysis of income and poverty spells over time. She served on the National Academy of Sciences Panel to evaluate the SIPP in 1989 and 1990. More

Seth Sanders is a Senior Research Fellow, in the Economic, Labor, and Population Studies Department.

Susan Schechter is a Senior Fellow in the Health Care Research department. She joined NORC in 2010 and advises clients in the areas of statistical policy, survey management, data collection operations, and questionnaire design. Schechter's expertise includes directing large-scale multimode surveys and cognitive research methods. More

​Fritz Scheuren is Senior Fellow and Vice President at NORC in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research.  Scheuren has an unparalleled record of work on complex substantive tasks related to sampling and to the analysis of data from government agencies and private sector institutions. His expertise is in applying innovative and rigorous statistical methodology in the social sciences, particularly in the arena of human rights, voter behavior, and financial restitution. More

Barbara Schneider is a Senior Fellow in the Academic Research Centers at NORC and is the John A. Hannah University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at Michigan State University. Professor Schneider's expertise includes the social context of schooling, working families, research methodology, study design and analysis, program evaluation, and technical assistance. More

Michael D. Sinclair is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research. Sinclair's expertise centers on the design and analysis of large-scale sample surveys including the development of complex sample designs to achieve multiple objectives, methods for identifying rare populations, nonsampling error assessment, survey weighting, data imputation and variance estimation. Subject areas include employment discrimination assessment, health and education surveys, labor market evaluations, justice statistics, marketing research, transit, nutrition, and statistical litigation support. More

Avi Singh is a Senior Fellow in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research at NORC and has more than 35 years of postdoctoral research experience. His areas of expertise include design and analysis of spatial and temporal surveys, small-area and latent variable modeling, and protecting confidentiality and quality of data. More

NORC Senior Fellow Becky Smerdon is a nationally recognized expert in high school reform. During her 15 years in the field of education research and evaluation, she has led numerous studies, including: a formative and summative evaluation of Baltimore's high school reform initiative, a study of the math/science pipeline in North Carolina's high schools, and a project developing indicators of high school reform implementation funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. More

Senior Fellow Tom Smith directs NORC's Center for the Study of Politics and Society and is Director of the General Social Survey (GSS), one of NORC's most visible projects and one of the nation's most heavily utilized datasets. Smith's expertise includes trends and public opinions on guns, religion, altruism, national pride, happiness, and sexual behavior. More

Helen H. Suh is the Program Area Director for Environmental Health in the Public Health Research department. She is also head of NORC's Boston office. Suh's expertise includes environmental health, exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, environmental measurements, air pollution, health disparities, study design, and risk assessment. Suh is an internationally recognized expert in air pollution health effects, with more than 20 years of experience leading multidisciplinary teams in environmental health research. More

Bruce Taylor, Senior Fellow and Principal Research Scientist with NORC at the University of Chicago in the Substance Abuse, Mental Health, and Criminal Justice Studies department, has conducted studies on violence prevention, violent offenders, victimization, policing and dynamics of drug markets. His current research examines the effectiveness of a dating violence prevention program in schools, the dynamics of drug markets, license plate recognition devices in reducing auto theft, the integration of crime analysis into patrol work, community policing self-assessment tools, and officer safety. Taylor has 20 years of professional experience in applied research, field experiments, statistical analysis, measurement, survey design, and program evaluation in criminal justice. More

​Lowell Taylor is a Senior Fellow in NORC’s Economic, Labor, and Population Studies department and has been on the Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School faculty since 1990. He is currently the H. John Heinz III Professor of Economics and the Academic Director of the Center for Economic Development.  He served as Director of the Heinz School Ph.D. Program from 2000 to 2002 and as Associate Dean for Faculty from 2002 to 2005. Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon University, he taught in the economics departments at Miami University and the University of Texas at Austin. In 2000. he worked as Senior Economist for President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. More

Senior Fellow Linda Waite directs NORC's Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging. Waite's expertise includes social demography, aging, working families, and links between biology, psychology, and the social world. More

Kirk M. Wolter is Executive Vice President and a Senior Fellow at NORC and Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago. He is an internationally recognized expert in survey statistics and methods. More

Clifford Zinnes is a Senior Fellow in the International Projects department at NORC.  He specializes in the application of quantitative methods and institutional economics to improve aid effectiveness and economic reform in developing countries. Zinnes has a dozen years of experience designing and overseeing impact evaluations. More