DISSC 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.