About

Like an astronomer with a telescope that can help us see 1,000 times farther, we now have a chance at building the tools to understand human society well enough to ameliorate some of its major problems. The spectacular successes we have seen in the last few years are nothing compared to what is coming. Come join us; you can make a difference.

IQSS aims to accomplish its goals by building bridges from academia to the rest of the world—by collaborating with industry and governments in incentive-compatible ways to produce social good for academia, companies, and the general public; by incubating programs, centers, and initiatives to become part of the Institute, other parts of Harvard, and independent nonprofits and commercial startups; and by building cutting edge infrastructure so scholars can do social science research better, faster, bigger, and more efficiently here than anywhere in the world.

We foster a flourishing community where students, faculty, and staff leverage each other's advances to take us all to the next level; this approach has been especially powerful in response to the pandemic as IQSS has helped researchers quickly adapt to remote work.

Many of our faculty, research staff, students and affiliates have been inspired to turn to thinking about how they can help during this worldwide crisis. Determining the impact of COVID-19 across the world, and developing plans to combat the virus, will be the overwhelming public health challenge of the coming year, and likely beyond. IQSS’s expertise mapping, data analysis and statistics at an enormous scale make us well-suited to mobilize on these issues.

One example of this is the IQSS Dataverse repository platform. Dataverse quickly emerged as a leading platform to deposit and share relevant COVID-19 data that researchers from other vetted institutions can analyze and add to, establishing a research hub for academics across the world to do crucial research. With the ability to share data and workflow for others to replicate and build on, we can help to improve research results for visualization, publication and education at a time when this information is needed most.

As we weather the pandemic, we continue to welcome numerous centers and institutes at universities around the world to copy what we have built at IQSS. Administrators from other institutions have visited here so regularly that we have standard protocols of meetings and tours for these events, and have even written an article summarizing our suggestions for others (see "Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science"). We are lucky to be in an unusual part of the economy where we do best ourselves when we help others and so we aim to lead in collaborative, academic ways—helping others build what we have built, while continuing to stay ahead by developing the next innovation to push forward the science of society to new heights.