Yale hires Borzekowski to lead new Data-Intensive Social Science Center

Yale University has appointed economist Ron Borzekowski as executive director of the institution’s new center for data-Intensive social science research.

He joins from Amazon Web Services, where he was director of economics, and before that spent eight years leading an economic research program at the Consumer Financial Protection Board.

Prior to this, Borzekowski worked as deputy research director at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and also as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Research and Statistics. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford.

Yale’s Data-Intensive Social Science Center (DISSC) is a new multi-disciplinary research center that is intended to facilitate research projects across multiple fields including political science, psychology, economics and sociology. In particular, it will provide the infrastructure needed to support the acquisition, security and use of massive datasets for research projects.

Commenting on Borzekowski’s appointment, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Director of Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies Alan Gerber said: “Many of the next generation of scientific discoveries in social science will be based on new types of data and advances in computation. The DISSC will make sure that Yale’s infrastructure to support this research is unsurpassed.”

He added: “Ron is an outstanding addition to our community and exceptionally well qualified to help lead this effort.”

Borzekowski said: “Our aim is to build a community of researchers with expertise and interests in different methods and applications for data-driven social science … [m]any of the pieces are already in place. It’s just a matter of uniting them into a cohesive whole.”

Borzekowski started work in July, and DISSC is expected to open for research in early 2023.