77 Prospect Street, 203.432.3234
http://isps.yale.edu

Director
Alan Gerber

Executive Committee Steven Berry, Kerwin Charles, Ana De La O, Heather Gerken, Grace Kao, John Lafferty, Steven Wilkinson

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) is an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to furthering our understanding of society and sharing that knowledge to improve policy and practice.

Recognizing that important social problems cannot be studied adequately by a single discipline, the Yale Corporation established ISPS in 1968 to stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration within the university, both across the social sciences and between the social sciences and other disciplines. Over the decades, ISPS has conducted research on elections, education, criminal justice, health care, government regulation, labor, taxation, immigration, and much more. Today, ISPS maintains a broad research portfolio among its many interdisciplinary faculty affiliates.

In addition to conducting research, ISPS organizes faculty seminars, hosts and promotes collaborations among faculty fellows and postdoctoral researchers, runs fellowships to mentor undergraduate and graduate students, convenes scholars and practitioners from across the country to learn from one another, and helps sponsor an interdisciplinary undergraduate major: the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics (EP&E).

ISPS also supports specialized study centers: the Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP), the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, the Center for the Study of Inequality, and the Data-Intensive Social Science Center. And ISPS recently launched its Democratic Innovations program, designed to identify and test new ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance.

Our commitment to training students for future leadership centers around our four fellowship programs: Dahl Research Scholars, Director’s Fellows, Millstone Fellows (for undergraduates), and the Graduate Policy Fellows (for graduate and professional school students). These fellowships offer students the opportunity to apply rigorous research to real-world social policy issues. In these yearlong programs, we offer the scholars biweekly workshops, mentorship, media training, and a series of policy-related skill training sessions. ISPS also runs a two-year predoctoral fellowship through CSAP and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy.

As the hub for problem-oriented interdisciplinary research at Yale, ISPS provides intellectual leadership in the social sciences; fosters sound and creative research on public policies of local, state, and national significance; and informs both teaching at Yale and academic and public debates beyond Yale.