Fay Lomax Cook
Institute for Policy Research

Fay Lomax Cook is director of the Institute for Policy Research and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy in the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. She spent the 2004-05 academic year as a visiting professor at Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) where she helped to organize a conference entitled “Reforming Social Policy – A Transatlantic Perspective: The Politics of Health and Pension Policy in France and the United States” and gave talks on the politics of pension policy and on the so-called “crisis” of the welfare state to various groups in Paris. She has been President of the Gerontological Society of America (2000); a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1997-98); a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1987-88); a member of the Expert Panel on Performance Outcome Measurement, U.S. Administration on Aging; a member of the Ford Foundation's research advisory committee on Social Welfare Policy and the American Future; a scientific consultant to the National Institute on Aging; and a member of the North American Program Committee for the International Congress on Gerontology. She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in social policy. Her research focuses on the interrelationships between public opinion and social policy, the politics of public policy, and the dynamics of public support for Social Security and other social programs. She is the author or co-author of many scholarly articles and book chapters as well as four books, including Support for the American welfare state: The views of congress and the public (with Edith J. Barrett) New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, and Navigating public opinion: Polls, policy, and the future of American democracy (with J. Manza and B. Page, Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).