Thank you Maggie Levenstein, outgoing ICPSR Director
ICPSR has been an integral partner in the work to back up and advocate for public data. Without ICPSR’s DataLumos, the volunteers of the Data Rescue Project would not have had the infrastructure necessary to make our rescued data accessible. This has been key for the DRP, as our mission has always been to ensure public access to public data can remain a public good - a goal we would not have been able to achieve without the active commitment from ICPSR. Thanks to their support, and the amazing DRP volunteers, we have loaded more than 4,000 datasets since February 2025!
Our primary supporter at ICPSR has been Maggie Levenstein, who has served as the Director for more than a decade. Although we have been lucky to work with and learn from many ICPSR staff, including John Kubale, Erin Meyer, and many more, Maggie’s support has been unwavering, both in championing DataLumos and advocating for data rescue more broadly. ICPSR recently announced that in August Maggie will be stepping away from the Director position to return to the U-Mich faculty roster and take a well deserved sabbatical in September. We are looking forward to celebrating with Maggie at a virtual celebration on August 11.
We are also very excited to hear that Trent Alexander, the current Associate Director of ICPSR, will serve as the Interim Director during the search for Maggie’s replacement. He currently leads the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage Project with Katie Genadek. This fantastic project aims to link individual respondent records from the decennial censuses of 1960 through 1990, and will be available to researchers working with federal data in the Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs). We look forward to working more closely with Trent in the coming months!
Please join us in thanking Maggie for her support and wishing her a restful sabbatical! 🛟❤️
