Seth Sanders Selected as New Director of DuPRI
The Provost’s Office has named Economics Professor Seth Sanders as the new director of the Duke University Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI). Sanders takes over for James Vaupel, the founding DuPRI director, who took key steps toward integrating population sciences at Duke. Sanders was a consensus choice among DuPRI researchers to succeed Vaupel and was recommended by a 2008-2009 DuPRI search committee headed by Joe Hotz.
“We are very lucky to have the agreement of Seth Sanders to take on this important leadership role at an extremely exciting time in the history of the population sciences at Duke University. We have collected at Duke a most unusual group of interdisciplinary faculty who can, and will, do extraordinary collaborative work that cuts across disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. Sanders has a creative vision and a brilliant strategy to bring this group of researchers together around research topics that bear on some of the most important societal challenges,” said Susan Roth, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies.
Sanders joined Duke University in 2008 and is a professor in the Department of Economics and the Sanford School of Public Policy. In his previous position at the University of Maryland, he played a vital role in the success of the Maryland Population Research Center (MPRC), which has similar goals as DuPRI. Over the past few years, Sanders has been involved in four broad research programs: (1) the economic and health consequences of migration and immigration, (2) economic shocks and the effects on workers and families, (3) gay and lesbian families and their performance in the U.S. economy, and (4) gender and racial wage differences among the highly educated.
The areas of research fit well with DuPRI's research focuses including: Aging and Health and Family, Fertility, and Migration. DuPRI’s mission is to organize the breadth and depth of population research at Duke into a synergistic whole much greater than the sum of its parts; to attract to the Duke faculty some of the field’s most highly acclaimed researchers as well as some of the field's most outstanding new talent; and to expand the intellectual activity at Duke devoted to population research in the classroom as well as in the laboratory and in the field.
Seth Sanders said, “I am excited to build on the leadership of our founding director, James Vaupel who has set a unique direction for DuPRI. Our challenge is to leverage the individual contributions of our scholars into a collective enterprise that will yield science that is new, innovative and extends our knowledge in ways that scholars working independently cannot.”
“DuPRI is fortunate to have as its director someone of Seth Sanders's talents. In addition to being an outstanding population researcher, Sanders has demonstrated a strong record of leadership in building an NIH-funded population research center at the University of Maryland. His ability to bring together researchers from different disciplines and perspectives will serve DuPRI well over the coming years,” said Joe Hotz, DuPRI Search Committee Chair and Professor, Department of Economics.