Dr. Michael Lachanski is the deputy director for Data, Policy, and Science at the U.S. Census Bureau.

Michael is a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Commerce's Office of the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis and houses the department’s chief data officer and evaluation officer. His portfolio centers on two of the Census Bureau’s most consequential modernization priorities: expanding its administrative records holdings and reducing barriers to the adoption of artificial intelligence across the federal statistical system.

Michael’s first tour of federal service came through Princeton University’s Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative, the university’s flagship federal service fellowship. Placed first at the Federal Aviation Administration as an economist in 2017, then at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, he spent the final and longest leg of the fellowship at the Census Bureau, serving from 2018 to 2019 in the Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division, where he worked on the Survey of Income and Program Participation. His current appointment marks his return to the Department of Commerce. 

A demographer by training, Michael holds a joint doctorate in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in statistics and data science from the Wharton School, and a bachelor’s degree in economics (summa cum laude) and a master’s degree in public administration (with distinction) from Princeton University. During the 2025–2026 academic year, he was the inaugural postdoctoral data science fellow at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His research on labor markets, organizational demography and human capital has appeared in outlets including Science Advances, Demographic Research, Econ Journal Watch, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Capitalism & Society, the Journal of Human Capital, and the American Economic Association’s Papers & Proceedings. Recently, his work on U.S. job stability received a Best Paper Award from the Academy of Management’s Careers Division, given to roughly the top 10 percent of accepted papers. He has presented his research at the Population Association of America’s (PAA) Annual Meeting, the PAA Applied Demography Conference, the Mercatus Center’s annual Markets & Society conference, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s Fall Research Conference. 

He is committed to strengthening the federal statistical system’s enterprise data infrastructure so that the Census Bureau can continue to deliver comprehensive, continuous, timely and relevant statistics for policymakers, the American people and businesses well into and through the 21st century.