Roderick Harrison is the founding director of DataBank, an online clearinghouse of data on African Americans and other ethnic populations. Previously, he served as chief of the U.S. Census Bureau's Racial Statistics Branch where he helped to expand the content and number of the Bureau's publications and releases on racial and ethnic populations. In 1998, the American Statistical Society awarded him the Roger Herriot Award for Innovations in Federal Statistics for his work in revising the racial and ethnic classifications used by all federal agencies and efforts in developing new classifications on race and ethnicity for the 2000 Census.

Dr. Harrison held a joint appointment in the Afro-American Studies and Sociology departments at Harvard University and also taught at UCLA. He currently teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Howard University. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton and his A.B. from Harvard.

Speaking Topics

Census Issues
Demographic Trends
Economic Trends

Selected Published Works

• "Race/Ethnic Differences in the Sequences of Drugs Used by Women" with Vernetta Young Journal of Drug Issues. (Spring 2001)
• "Segregation Indices," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2001)
• "Inadequacies of Multiple Response Race Data in the Federal Statistical System," Multiraciality: How Will the New Census Data Be Used? (The Levy Institute and Russell Sage Foundation, 2001)
• "Racial and Ethnic Diversity" with Claudette E. Bennett, State of the Union: America in the 1990s. Volume II: Social Trends. (Russell Sage Foundation, 1995)
• "Evaluating Racial and Ethnic Reporting in the 1990 Census" with Nampeo McKenney, Claudette Bennett and Jorge del Pinal. (1993)
• Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section. (The American Statistical Association, 1993)
• "How Important Were Changes in Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation Between 1980 and 1990?" with Daniel H. Weinberg. (1992)
• Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section. (The American Statistical Association, 1992)