Julia is a Professor Emerita at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She was a senior advisor in the Office of the Federal CIO at the White House, supporting the implementation of the Federal Data Strategy. She recently served on the Advisory Committee on Data for Evidence Building and the National AI Research Resources Task Force, the Secretary of Labor’s Workforce Innovation Advisory Committee and the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure. She currently serves on the advisory boards of the UK Data Service, Te Pūnaha Matatini (NZ), BERD@NFDI (Germany), Electronic Privacy Information Center (US), and the National Data Platform (US).
Julia is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Statistical Institute and the American Statistical Association. She is the recipient of the 2004 Vladimir Chavrid award from the National Association of State Workforce Agencies as well the 2014 Julius Shiskin award, the 2025 Society of Labor Economists Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurementthe 2014 Roger Herriot award from the American Statistical Association and the 2019 LEHD Founders award from the Census Bureau for establishing the LEHD program. She is also the recipient of the 2017 Warren E. Miller Award and the 2019 Distinguished Fellow award from the New Zealand Association of Economists.
Julia has initiated and founded or co-founded a number of public data infrastructures, including the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program, the USPTO’s Patentsview, STAR METRICS/UMETRICS at the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science at the University of Michigan, and Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure. She also has created data access infrastructures: the remote data access enclave at NORC at the University of Chicago, the Administrative Data Research Facility at NYU and then the Coleridge Initiative. She developed the Applied Data Analytics training program at the Coleridge Initiative and the Executive Certificate in Data Literacy and Evidence Building at NYU and the University of Maryland. She is currently working with a number of scientific and statistical agencies on the Democratizing Data project; an example of the work is here. She has authored over 80 scientific publications, edited or coauthored 13 books, and received over $180 million in grants and contracts from national and international agencies and foundations.
She holds a PhD in Economics and an MA in Statistics.
Julia Lane
Latest Highlights
New Publication
Aug 2026 Data-usage descriptors as search metadata: the case of food security data and the National Data Platform Nature journal Scientific Data
New Op-ed
Mar 2026 Reinventing workforce data for the innovation economy, Govtech (with Suzette Kent)
Recent and Upcoming Presentations
Jun 2026 Navigating the Skills Frontier, Presentation at US Department of Labor (on YouTube)
Aug 19, 2026 Big Data to Big Insights: Challenges and Opportunities in Aging and AD/ADRD Research
Sep 3, 2026, 12–1 PM ET An overview of the Industries of Ideas project. Register for Zoom workshop
Oct 28, 2026, 12–12:15 ET NYU Migration network