Professor Judith Seltzer of the UCLA Department of Sociology and director of the California Center for Population Research at UCLA, has been appointed to the National Research Council’s Standing Committee on Reengineering Census Operations.
Her appointment was made by the Committee on National Statistics, established in 1972 at the National Academies (comprised of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council) to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. The five-year, standing committee and its subgroups on particular topics will meet periodically with U.S. Census Bureau staff and other invited guests to discuss issues relevant to 2020 planning and economic and other census program modernization.
The U.S. census is the basis for apportionment, the determination of the proportional number of members each U.S. state sends to the House of Representatives. Census data are also used for allocating state and federal funds and for helping businesses and policymakers at all levels of government understand the characteristics of the U.S. population in ways that inform decisions affecting the public welfare.
Seltzer previously served on three census-related National Research Council panels: the Panel on Residence Rules in the Decennial Census, the Panel on the Design of the 2010 Census Program of Evaluations and Experiments and the Panel to Review the 2010 Census. She currently serves as president-elect of the Population Association of America, and she will serve as president in 2016.
Seltzer has a B.A. in sociology from Princeton and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Before joining UCLA in 1998, she was on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she contributed to the development and implementation of the National Survey of Families and Households.
