Appendix B
Biographical Sketches of Panel Members and Staff
JOHN L. CZAJKA (Chair) is a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. His work has focused on statistical uses of administrative records and the evaluation of survey estimates of poverty, assets, and program participation. He has served on several National Academies panels, addressing issues related to the 2000 census, the adequacy of existing data for evaluating the impact of welfare reform, the collection of data on state and local governments, reengineering SIPP, and measuring medical care economic risk. Dr. Czajka is a past president of the Washington Statistical Society and a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.
MARIANNE BITLER is a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. Earlier she was a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine. She has also worked at the Public Policy Institute of California, the RAND Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Bitler is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research interests focus on the effects of government safety net programs on disadvantaged groups, economic demography, health economics, public economics, and the economics of education. She has served on several National Academies panels. Dr. Bitler holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ADRIANNE BRADFORD (Research Associate) is a research associate for the Committee on National Statistics, National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine. She is also a full-time Ph.D. student at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. Ms. Bradford received a M.S. in survey methodology and a B.S. in computer science and psychology at the University of Maryland.
PETER BRANDON is professor of sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He has held faculty positions in sociology and social demography at Carleton College, Northfield, MN; the Australian National University, Canberra; the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; and Brown University. He has a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago, an M.P.P. from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. from Michigan State University. Dr. Brandon is a “hands-on” researcher using SIPP data and teaches classes specifically on using this data for research.
MICHAEL ELLIOTT is professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and research professor of survey methodology at the Institute for Social Research. He received his Ph.D. in biostatistics from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he held an appointment as an assistant professor (clinical educator) at the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dr. Elliott’s statistical research interests focus around the broad topic of “missing data,” including the design and analysis of sample surveys, casual and counterfactual inference, and latent variable models. He has worked closely with collaborators in injury research, pediatrics, women’s health, and the social determinants of physical and mental health.
CAROL HOUSE (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Previous projects include the American Opportunity Study, as well as projects on measuring research and development expenditures in the nonprofit sector, the National Crime Victimization Survey’s measures of rape and sexual assault, and redesign options for the Consumer Expenditure surveys. She retired from the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2010 where she was deputy administrator for programs and products and chair of the Agricultural Statistics Board. Her previous positions at NASS included associate administrator, director of research and development, and director of survey management. She has provided statistical consulting in Sweden, China, Poland, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and was elected to membership in the International Statistical Institute. Her graduate training was in mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
ANDREW HOUTENVILLE is an associate professor of economics and research director at the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire. His research focuses on the design of survey questions to identify people with disabilities; analysis of time trends and geographic dispersion in disability and the employment of people with disabilities; and identification of economic, social, programmatic, and workplace barriers and facilitators to the participation of people with disabilities in the labor market. He is currently the principal investigator of the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) on Disability Statistics and Demographics and the RRTC on Employment Policy and Measurement, both funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. He received an M.A. in economics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of New Hampshire.
JOHN ICELAND is professor of sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University. Previously, he was an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a faculty associate of the Maryland Population Research Center. He was chief of the Poverty and Health Statistics Branch at the U.S. Census Bureau before joining the Maryland faculty in 2003. His research focuses on poverty and residential segregation issues. He has authored numerous papers and reports on poverty patterns, causes, and measurement. His work on residential segregation examines general trends among various groups using a variety of measures, and he is currently examining the residential patterns of immigrants. He served on the National Academies panel on reengineering SIPP. He has a Ph.D. from Brown University.
KOSUKE IMAI is a professor in the Department of Politics and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning at Princeton University. He was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning and an executive committee member of the Program for Quantitative and Analytical Political Science. He is also a visiting professor at the graduate schools of Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo. Dr. Imai is an elected fellow in the Society for Political Methodology and currently serves as president of that organization. Dr. Imai’s research area is political methodology and more generally applied statistics in the social sciences. He has extensively worked on the development and applications of statistical methods for causal inference with experimental and observational data. Other areas of his methodological research are survey methodology and computational algorithms for data-intensive social science research. After obtaining a B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Tokyo (1998), Dr. Imai received an A.M. in statistics (2002) and a Ph.D. in political science (2003) from Harvard University.
DAN KASPRZYK is with NORC at the University of Chicago, and also serves as a private consultant. Previously, Dr. Kasprzyk was a senior fellow and vice president and director of the Center for Excellence in Survey Research at NORC at the University of Chicago. Prior to his appointment at NORC, he was vice president and managing director of Surveys and Statistics at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Dr. Kasprzyk has more than 25 years of experience in managing large-scale sample surveys for the federal government. Prior to his private-sector positions, Dr. Kasprzyk was program director at the National Center for Education Statistics, where he was responsible for a number of education surveys; prior to this position, he held various positions on the staff of the Survey of Income and Program Participation at the Census Bureau. Dr. Kasprzyk is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and fellow and former vice president of the American Statistical Association. Dr. Kasprzyk received his Ph.D. in mathematical statistics from the George Washington University.
LUKE SHAEFER is the director of Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, an interdisciplinary, university-level initiative that seeks to inform, identify, and test innovative strategies to prevent and alleviate poverty. He is an associate professor at the University of Michigan, School of Social Work and Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His research on poverty and social welfare policy in the United States focuses on the effectiveness of the social safety net in serving low-wage workers and economically disadvantaged families. He has been published in top peer-reviewed academic journals such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and the American Journal of Public Health and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, among other sources. Dr. Shaefer is a “hands-on” researcher using SIPP data and has hosted a workshop on working with SIPP data. Dr. Shaefer received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in social service administration from the University of Chicago.
ARLOC SHERMAN is a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. His work focuses on family income trends, income support policies, and the causes and consequences of poverty. He is a specialist in the impact of poverty and public policy on child development and has written extensively about parental employment and unemployment, welfare reform, barriers to employment, family structure, the depth of poverty, racial inequality, tax policy for low-income families, and the special challenges affecting rural areas. Sherman worked for 14 years as senior research associate at the Children’s Defense Fund and was previously a researcher at the Center for Law and Social Policy. He returns to the center after a long absence, having also worked there in 1986 and 1987. His book Wasting America’s Future was nominated for the 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Recent published
works are A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality; SNAP Benefit Cuts Will Affect Thousands of Veterans in Every State; Census Data Show Poverty and Inequality Remained High in 2012; and Median Income Was Stagnant, But Fewer Americans Were Uninsured.
KAREN E. SMITH is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Her main area of expertise is the design and implementation of microsimulation models in a social policy environment. During the past 30 years, she has developed microsimulation models for Social Security, pensions, taxation, wealth and savings, labor supply, charitable giving, health expenditure, student aid, and welfare reform. Ms. Smith has played a lead role in the development of the U.S. Social Security Administration’s Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT) microsimulation model, the Urban Institute’s Dynamic Simulation of Income (DYNASIM) microsimulation model, and the U.S. Social Security Administration’s Policy Simulation Model (POLISIM). Her recent work includes estimating the distributional impact of alternate pension, taxation, and Social Security reforms and their effects on Trust Fund balances. Her work also includes estimating the income and asset accumulation patterns of the adult population, analyzing the retirement decision, evaluating the effect of disability on earnings and mortality, and using statistical matching to impute earnings, taxes, and spousal characteristics. Ms. Smith earned her B.A. in computer science and economics from the University of Michigan.
TOM W. SMITH is a survey methodologist at NORC at the University of Chicago. Dr. Smith has served as director and principal investigator of the General Social Survey since 1980, one of NORC’s most visible projects and one of the nation’s most heavily utilized datasets. He is co-founder and former secretary general of the International Social Survey Program. He is frequently consulted and quoted by the news media on such diverse topics as American sexual behavior, intergroup relations, confidence in institutions, happiness, religion, guns, and voter behavior. Smith is a prolific writer, analyzing and publishing the results of his studies in peer reviewed journals and NORC-published reports aimed at students, scholars and policymakers. He is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Dr. Smith has B.A.’s in history and political science as well as an M.A. in history from Pennsylvania State University, and he earned his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.
JAMES P. ZILIAK holds the Carol Martin Gatton endowed chair in microeconomics in the Department of Economics and is founding director of the Center for Poverty Research and the Kentucky Federal Statistical Research Data Center at the University of Kentucky. He received B.S. and B.A.
degrees in economics and sociology from Purdue University, and his Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University. He previously served as assistant and associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon, and has held visiting positions at the Brookings Institution, Russell Sage Foundation, University College London, University of Michigan, and University of Wisconsin. His research expertise is in the areas of labor economics, poverty, food insecurity, and tax and transfer policy, and he has published widely in leading journals in the economics profession. He was past chair of the Board of Overseers of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, served as chair of the Committee on National Statistics Workshop on an Agenda for Child Hunger Food Insecurity Research, and was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Examination of the Adequacy of Food Resources and SNAP Allotments.
