IPUMS Organization

IPUMS is situated within the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, alongside the Minnesota Population Center, Life Course Center, and Minnesota Research Data Center.

Within IPUMS, each project sets its own goals, but operates within a shared technical infrastructure. Each project has funding from one or more grants, a project manager, and an advisory body specific to the project. All IPUMS projects share central resources, including administrative support and our information technology teams. To coordinate research sharing and capitalize on synergies across projects, IPUMS has a number of cross-project organizational structures.

Cross-Project Coordination

IPUMS Executive Committee

This committee serves to coordinate activities across all IPUMS projects, identify cross-cutting problems and determine action, and request funding from ISRDI. The Executive Committee currently includes:

  • Steve Ruggles, Director of IPUMS
  • Fran Fabrizio, IT Director
  • Cathy Fitch, ISRDI Associate Director & MnRDC Executive Director
  • Sarah Flood, Director of U.S. Survey Projects
  • Dave Van Riper, Director of Spatial Analysis
  • Matt Sobek, Director of Data Integration
Dissemination, Outreach, and Training (DOT)

Staff from the IPUMS-wide administrative team support dissemination, outreach, and training activities, including:

  • Managing the user support team
  • Coordinating outreach materials for conferences
  • Scheduling and supporting webinars
  • Compiling email announcements
  • Editing the “Use it for Good” IPUMS blog

DOT staff coordinate with project managers with a monthly survey and cross-project meetings approximately quarterly.

IT priorities setting

The IT Director and IT team managers meet monthly with representatives from the IPUMS Executive Committee and microdata and spatial project groups to set high-level priorities for software development work.

Allied project groups

IPUMS projects can be broadly divided into those handling individual- and household-level microdata (USA, International, CPS, Health Surveys, Global Health, and Time Use) and those handling aggregate and spatial data (NHGIS, IHGIS, GeoMarker, Terra). Microdata research staff meet bi-monthly as a group and more frequently as smaller groups of related projects or teams working on cross-project problems. Research staff on the spatial projects meet weekly and frequently work across multiple projects.

Project advisory bodies

Each IPUMS project draws on expertise from within the University of Minnesota and a range of institutions across the U.S. and internationally.