Newsroom Archive

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations and has named Sandra Newman as a member of the committee.

The National Advisory Committee will advise the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau’s programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, will advise the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations.

“We expect that the expertise of this committee will help us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing statistics about our diverse nation,” said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau’s acting director. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee will help ensure that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The National Advisory Committee members, who serve at the discretion of the Census Bureau director, are chosen to serve based on expertise and knowledge of the cultural patterns, issues and/or statistical needs of hard-to-count populations.

Sandra Newman is a professor of policy studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she also directs both the Center on Housing, Neighborhoods and Communities and the International Fellows in Urban Studies Program at the Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. She holds joint professorial appointments with the departments of Sociology and Health Policy and Management. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the effects of housing and neighborhoods on children and families and on the dynamics of neighborhood change. Her current research includes studies of the effects of key housing attributes, such as affordability, tenure (owning versus renting) and receipt of housing subsidies on the life outcomes of children and adults, and the changes in Baltimore neighborhoods over the last three decades. She is directing the housing component of the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Housing and Families with Children, which is launching a longitudinal mixed method study of the role of housing in children’s lives. She has written numerous articles and several books and serves on several research advisory boards. She received her doctorate degree from the Graduate School of Public Administration, now known as the Wagner School of Public Service of New York University.