Dan Gaylin is the Ralph Muller President & CEO of NORC at the University of Chicago. Under Dan’s leadership, NORC has grown its revenue over threefold and launched multiple leading-edge research, analytics, and dissemination initiatives including The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, AmeriSpeak^®, NORC VizStudio, the Center for Survey Panel Sciences, the GSS Data Explorer, and NORC Labs.

NORC is an objective, nonpartisan, global research institution with primary offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C., and regional locations throughout the United States. The organization conducts over $320 million in annual research for government, nonprofit, and business clients in the United States and over 80 countries worldwide. NORC’s work covers the full range of the human experience, including economics and the workforce, education and learning, international development, health and well-being, and society and public affairs. Founded in 1941, NORC has a long-standing reputation for scientific rigor and innovative leadership in advancing the methods, scope, and accessibility of modern research.

Dan, who has 35 years of experience spanning government, private consulting, and not-for-profit research organizations, joined NORC in 2000 and has been president and CEO since 2013. He is a widely recognized expert in health care program evaluation. 

A hallmark of his work has been leadership of long-term, multimillion-dollar projects that combine primary data collection and analysis, analysis of existing data, and the use of qualitative research methods to gather and distill complex information into recommendations for improving policy, programs, and practice. He led the development of the congressionally mandated evaluation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program and directed several major patient care demonstration evaluations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Before joining NORC, Dan served as a senior advisor for Research and Planning at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Health Policy. He managed a portfolio of research projects designed to inform Secretarial-level policy initiatives and chaired or co-chaired several HHS-wide research workgroups that reported to the Secretary or the White House on high-priority topics including prescription drug policy, children’s health insurance, and departmental research coordination. Prior to his role at HHS, Dan was a vice president at The Lewin Group, a private health care consultancy, and a research associate and program director at the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.

Dan is a frequent speaker both nationally and internationally on issues related to the effective use of data and information to inform decision-making, the democratization of data, data transparency, and data literacy. Central to these presentations is the importance of data quality and the imperative to keep the needs of people, communities, and civil society at the center of data collection and analysis in a rapidly growing and evolving digital world. Dan has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs.

In 2025, Dan published Fact Forward: The Perils of Bad Information and the Promise of a Data-Savvy Society, a book that guides readers through the data pipeline, describing how data are gathered and analyzed and how to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy data. Fact Forward provides solutions for greater transparency on the part of data producers, increased data literacy on the part of data communicators and data consumers, and a societal commitment to data education and infrastructure.