Arthur Lupia


Arthur Lupia is an American political scientist. He is the Hal R. Varian Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan and Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation. Prior to joining NSF, he was Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Open Science and Chair of National Research Council's Roundtable on the Application of Behavioral and Social Science. His research how information and institutions affect policy and politics, with a focus on how people make decisions when they lack information. He draws from multiple scientific and philosophical disciplines and uses multiple research methods. His topics of expertise include information processing, persuasion, strategic communication, and civic competence.

Education and career

Lupia received a B.A. degree in economics from the University of Rochester and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in social science from the California Institute of Technology. He has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Michigan.
He has held a range of scientific leadership positions. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Academy of Science, and as an Executive Board member of Climate Central. In the past, he has served as Chair of the Social, Economic, and Political Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was co-founder of TESS, which has helped hundreds of scientists from many disciplines run innovative experiments on opinion formation and change using nationally representative subject pools. As a contributor and then as Principal Investigator to the National Science Foundation's EITM program, he helped to develop curricula that show young scholars how to better integrate advanced empirical and theoretical methods into effective research agendas. As a Principal Investigator of the ANES, he introduced many procedural, methodological, and content innovations to one of the world's best-known scientific studies of elections.
He has led numerous task forces on scientific communication and research transparency and is regularly asked to advise scientific organizations and research groups on how to effectively communicate science to broad and diverse audiences. He has also led or advised numerous efforts to increase transparency and data availability in scientific publishing. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Guggenheim Fellow, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a recipient of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Innovator’s Award, the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Pool Award, and the National Academy of Science’s NAS Award for Initiatives in Research.

Selected publications

Books