Welcome, Karen S. Cook

IRiSS aims to advance socially relevant and consequential research and to become an international laboratory for ‘discoveries’ in the social sciences.

Welcome Letter from the Karen S. Cook, Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology

With the opening of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), Stanford enters a new period of innovative inquiry in the social sciences. In creating IRiSS, it is our intent to take the lead in establishing Stanford as the place where the major issues of social science are addressed. We take it as our mission to:

Initiate and strengthen multi-disciplinary research in the social sciences, enabling Stanford scholars and their collaborators to address significant challenges confronting us as a society.

Even while our social science departments are all extremely well regarded—all have high National Research Council rankings —social science research is undergoing a sea-change which demands new kinds of institutional structure and support for their continued success. It is the aim of the Institute to create a new model, in which we approach the social sciences in terms of the creation and dissemination of innovative multidisciplinary insights into complex problems. Explicitly modeled on research institutes in engineering and the natural sciences, where Stanford has built a reputation as a place where people make exciting discoveries in technology and medicine, IRiSS will advance ‘discovery research’ in areas that involve a mix of questions of psychology, sociology, economics, political science, anthropology and communication. For example, advancing the desire to transplant democracy to other nations or addressing problems of poverty and discrimination are, at their core, questions of social science.

Similarly, how we respond to global epidemics, or how we think about national health care, or how we provide for the common defense and respond to terrorism, demand answers from the social sciences, in conjunction with engineering, medicine, and law. In addressing questions such as these, IRiSS aims to advance socially relevant and consequential research and to become an international laboratory for ‘discoveries’ in the social sciences. It will be a place where the best scholars work out the appropriate methods, approaches to evidence, and creation of data sets in order to make discoveries.

Please let me know if you’d like to be on our mailing list for future events. I am grateful for your support today, and in the months ahead.

With good wishes,

Karen Cook
Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences,
Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences