BIP Lab Launches Susan E. Mayer Award for Excellence in Field Research in Honor of Harris Scholar

Earlier this year, at an event in the Keller Center’s fourth floor board room, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting (BIP) Lab surprised its faculty co-director, Susan E. Mayer, by launching the Susan E. Mayer Award for Excellence in Field Research.

Mayer – emeritus professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and former dean, serving from 2002 to 2009 – was told to be prepared for a photo session, but she did not expect that amidst regular BIP Lab business, a new award would be launched in her honor.

The BIP Lab was founded by Mayer and Ariel Kalil, now the Daniel Levin Professor at Harris, in 2014. Boasting a large staff of professional researchers, student research assistants, and operations-focused roles, the Lab works with schools, civic and religious organizations, and families with young children to study how programs and policies can support parents – especially low income parents – to support their children’s learning, development, and human flourishing.

For Mayer, the Lab is but the latest chapter in her search to better understand the factors that promote children’s success.

In Mayer’s own recounting, though her work has consistently focused on inequality and intergenerational economic mobility, her main areas of study had not always homed in on parents and the specific ways parents promote their children’s development in the home environment. In fact, much of her early work focused on broader settings, such as neighborhoods and schools, or economic policies related to government spending on income support for low-income families. But in her 1997 landmark book, What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances, she asked whether income directly affects children’s life chances, as was the conventional wisdom of the day, or if the factors that cause parents to have low incomes also impede their children’s life chances.

Mayer found that the effect of income on children’s outcomes is smaller than many experts have thought. Indeed, she concluded, money alone does not buy either the material or the psychological well-being that children require to succeed. This conclusion galvanized her interest in studying parents’ decision-making and the forces, including parents’ preferences, motivations, expectations, and mental health, that shape how parents invest in their children’s development.

Mayer completed her undergraduate studies in Sociology at Indiana University. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 1986, where she studied under the direction of Christopher (“Sandy”) Jencks. Mayer joined the faculty of the Harris School of Public Policy in 1989.

When Mayer joined its faculty in 1989, Harris was just two years past the Council of the University Senate recommending that the University establish a professional Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and the school’s first dean, Robert Michael, was appointed that very year (the school did not receive the Harris name until the next year).

Having spent more than 30 years at Harris, Mayer has made a big impression. Over the course of her time at UChicago, Mayer became not only the first woman to receive tenure, but also, as a sociologist, the first non-economist to achieve that distinction. In 2002, she became Harris’ dean, a role she held until 2009.

Among many other accomplishments, Mayer’s tenure as dean saw the creation of the Dean's International Council, broadening Harris’ impact around the globe.

In the years since the publication of her 1997 book, research proliferated across many fields establishing systematically that children of parents with higher socioeconomic status do better in many ways than children from lower socioeconomic status families. But upon her return to full-time research following her tenure as dean, Mayer returned to asking what are the implications of that fact, particularly in government policy. This question led her in new directions, both in her research questions and the methodologies she employs.

Driving her work today, as co-director of the BIP Lab, are new questions about factors shaping parent-child engagement and new approaches to testing hypotheses, including the large-scale field experiments and household surveys the BIP lab conducts. Mayer has become especially interested in the role of technology and the ways it might complement or even substitute for specific types of parental practices. She is also deeply interested in identifying the types of childhood skills that matter for long-run success, such as curiosity and complex thinking. As always, she is guided by the motivation to reduce social and economic inequality.

“Susan Mayer’s contributions to the Harris School are innumerable, and her work with the BIP Lab has dramatically increased our understanding of how to help parents support their children’s learning and development,” said Ariel Kalil. “It’s only fitting that Susan receive this distinction, in recognition for her singular role at Harris: as a scholar and as a visionary academic leader and educator.”

One of the most recent of the Lab’s endeavors is About TIME (Technology in Math Education), an initiative that involves almost 1,000 families with young children across Chicago to investigate whether digital applications are an effective method for teaching math to preschool-aged children, compared to the analog tools that previous generations grew up using.

This massive project necessitates a huge number of graduate and undergraduate research assistants; this year over 50 students will work on the About TIME study. Mayer prizes the work of these RAs, inspiring them with her consistent encouragement and her message that they are the heart of the BIP Lab – that it is their quality work in the field and at research sites that forms the backbone of the lab.

It is therefore fitting that the Susan E. Mayer Award was designed to honor student research assistants who have demonstrated excellence in field research implementation. It is the first Harris student award that comes with a monetary prize and academic recognition on the students’ official transcripts. Up to four student research assistants at the BIP Lab may be selected to receive the $500 award annually. Nominations made by BIP Lab research staff will be reviewed by a committee and awards will be announced by the last day of Spring quarter. Selected students must demonstrate the highest standards in contributions to data collection; representing the BIP Lab and Harris in the community; informing research design; improving data quality; and professionalism and collegiality.

“Susan is a mentor and friend to students and colleagues across Harris, and I was delighted to play a role in announcing the Susan E. Mayer Award for Excellence in Field Research,” said Michelle Park Michelini. “As a colleague and as a former Harris MPP student who has had the privilege of working with Susan, I know I speak for generations of students when I say that her tireless commitment to academic pursuits that address inequality reduction is inspiring. At the BIP Lab, Susan models for our research team what it means to be a thorough thinker and doer always with a human-centered approach. In turn we strive to train our student research assistants in the same rigorous way that Susan has trained us.”

Susan Mayer’s abiding commitment to reducing inequality and providing opportunities for parents and children to reach their full potential continues to reach new frontiers – a testament to her leadership and lifetime of trailblazing academic scholarship.