As a trained life course sociologist, University of Minnesota Life Course Center director Dr. Sarah Flood’s work has long been at the intersection of gender, work and family, time use, and well-being. With two decades as a leader at IPUMS, she is a fierce advocate for making public data accessible to advance rigorous science with incredibly deep expertise with the American Time Use Survey. Her foundational contributions to public data infrastructure that demystifies complex time diary data earned her and long-time collaborators Drs. Melissa Milkie and Liana Sayer the Ellen Galinsky Generative Researcher Award, presented by the Work and Family Researchers Network. The award recognizes work-family researchers who have contributed breakthrough thinking to the work-family field via theory, measures, and/or data sets that led to expansive application, innovation, and diffusion, including the sharing of research opportunities in the spirit of open science.
Founded in 1993, the mission of IPUMS is to preserve and harmonize the world’s population data and make them freely accessible to researchers. Over 15,000 people have registered to access the powerful tools that IPUMS offers to streamline data access and simplify complex analyses of time diary data. Time diary data, which report individuals’ activities over a 24-hour period, are a uniquely valuable resource for understanding countless aspects of daily life across time and between demographic groups – they are used to study work, parenting, caregiving, social isolation, health behaviors and many other topics.
This award joins an impressive list of accolades recognizing IPUMS researchers for their leadership, advocacy, and innovation in simplifying access to worldwide population data. IPUMS was recognized in 2025 with the Research, Science & Technology Institution of the Year award from Geospatial World and in 2022, IPUMS founder, Dr. Steven Ruggles, was named a MacArthur Fellow. Dr. Flood’s award also extends the Life Course Center’s tradition of rich scholarship on work and families across the lifecourse. Dr. Phyllis Moen, the Center’s former director, recently received the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work.
“IPUMS was founded with the understanding that democratizing data access advances science. We strive to develop cutting edge data and research tools for the entire research community that simplify the use of time diary data and reduce barriers to using other rich population data sources,” says Sarah Flood. “It’s an honor to see this work, done in collaboration with a remarkable group of colleagues, recognized.”