Susan B. Long

Susan B. Long is an associate professor of managerial statistics at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and currently heads the Civic Research Data Lab (CRDL) at Syracuse University.

She specializes in using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain federal government administrative records and directs a team of researchers which perform sophisticated statistical analyses on these records to make sense of and verify these complex relational files with millions of individual, case-by-case records. Her research team then builds data mining tools that enable them—along with journalists, policy makers, citizens and other researchers—to analyze and assess federal policies and practices. The resulting information is utterly unique in the marketplace of ideas, and its findings are frequently cited in major news reports and research journals.

During the ’80s, Long served as the director of the Center for Tax Studies at Syracuse University. In 1989, with David Burnham, she founded the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). She also has been a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Justice, Department of Justice and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Engineering Information, City University of London. Over the years she has been frequently asked to testify before Congress and related commissions on her research findings concerning various government programs, including the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service.

In 2006, Long was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame. She was also the recipient in 2012 of the Kharas Award for Distinguished Service in Civil Liberties, and is the 2012 Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend Award recipient.

Her current research focuses on reliability and validity issues in database systems, measurement, organization evaluation methods, and the design of data mining and analysis tools for non-statisticians.