Lauren Lanahan

(entered 2009) is a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon where she majored in Sociology. For her senior thesis, she examined race relations in the United States through the lens of racial residential distribution. After graduation she taught English in Japan for a year, and then returned to the US to work for the Social, Behavioral, & Economic Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation. There she was involved with a number of programs, including: Methodology, Measurements, and Statistics; Science, Technology, and Society; Ethics Education in Science and Engineering; and Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation.

This work piqued her interest in science and technology policy, particularly within the academic context. At UNC, she plans to continue along this line of research by looking at how different mechanisms and policies affect university research output.