After eight-and-a-half years at the helm of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), John M. Abowd is stepping down and devoting himself full time to his own teaching and research. Abowd, the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, will be on sabbatical for the spring semester conducting research at the University of Notre Dame's Department of Economics and Econometrics. A search is under way for a new director.

A reception honoring Abowd was held at Banfi's restaurant in December, and his visionary work as director with CISER was duly recognized. But Abowd says the reason for CISER's success is a "we" thing.

"I am delighted with all the work that we accomplished," said Abowd. "But too often a director gets more credit than he deserves. This always was a team effort, and the CISER staff collaborated effectively among themselves and our clients so we were always on the same page and that was a great experience."

Abowd joined Cornell in 1987 and served for seven years on the faculty of the Johnson School. In 1999 he assumed directorship of CISER, which was founded in 1981 to provide research support services to Cornell's social science community. In the past decade, CISER has grown and now offers a suite of services, including a state-of-the-art computing environment, support for the latest statistical software packages, and a variety of personalized consulting services. CISER's programs, greatly expanded and enhanced under Abowd's leadership, are tailored to the needs of faculty, research staff and graduate students from departments across campus. The institute is located at 391 Pine Tree Road, just north of East Hill Plaza.

Before coming to Cornell, he served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his many affiliations, Abowd is a distinguished senior research fellow at the U.S. Census Bureau; a research associate at the national Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.); a research affiliate at the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique in Paris; and a research fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics, in Germany.

In his work at the Census Bureau, Abowd has provided scientific leadership for the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program, which produces research and public-use data integrating demographic surveys, economic surveys and administrative data.

He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association and other major economics and statistics journals.