Julia Lane

Julia Lane is a Professor at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress, and a NYU Provostial Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects and a secure data facility.

Previous to this, Julia was a Senior Managing Economist and Institute Fellow at American Institutes for Research. In this role she co-founded the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) at the University of Michigan.

Prior to AIR, Julia was the Program Director of the Science of Science & Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program at the National Science Foundation. At NSF, she was the founder and developer of the STAR METRICS program to document the results of federal investments in science, and Co-Chair of the NSTC’s Science of Science Policy Interagency Group. Other previous positions include: Senior Vice President and Director, Economics Department at NORC/University of Chicago; Director of the Employment Dynamics Program at the Urban Institute; Senior Research Fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau; and Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at American University. In these positions, Julia founded and led many initiatives, including the initiated and founded the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program at the U.S. Census Bureau. This program was the first large-scale linked employer-employee dataset in the United States, and has evolved into a permanent Census Bureau program.

She created, developed and managed the NORC/University of Chicago data enclave. This provides a confidential, protected environment within which authorized researchers can access sensitive microdata remotely. Julia also led the Economics Department at NORC at the University of Chicago where she oversaw the implementation of some of the most visible social science surveys in the US.

Julia holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and a BA from Massey University in New Zealand.