Our Mission
To support and catalyze data-intensive social science research at the frontiers of each social science discipline at Yale.
We will do this by focusing on:
- Data Access: Providing access to high-value research datasets through licensing, acquisition, and provisioning.
- Research Services: Providing expert consultation and hands-on support throughout the research lifecycle.
- Research Engineering & Platforms: Navigating and directing researchers to available resources including secure, accessible computing environments, software, and tools for data-intensive work.
- Training & Community Engagement: Hosting workshops, programs, and events that build capacity and connections across communities of practice for scholars and research-facing staff.
- Partnerships & Outreach: Partnering with Yale’s social science and data service units to expand capacity and streamline access to data science resources.
Our History
In 2016, President Peter Salovey identified data-intensive social science as a top academic priority for Yale, emphasizing the application of empirical methods and data to public policy issues and matters of social concern. With that directive, the provost convened the University-Wide Data-Intensive Social Science Committee (DISSC) to “establish the key priorities in data-intensive social science for the next decade” and “make suggestions about organizational structures and behaviors that could support data-intensive social science at Yale.”
The result of that work was a recommendation in February 2020 for the “the creation of a data-intensive social science center at Yale”, anchored by a core facility for sensitive and restricted-use data” and declaring that the center “would become a crossroads for data-intensive social science researchers across the university.”
The Data-Intensive Social Science Center launched in 2022, uniting staff from across the university to form of a hub of research support and deepening the connections among scholars across the various schools and departments engaged in this mission.