Arthur Lupia

Arthur Lupia studies decision making and learning. His work clarifies 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. He uses this information to explain to convey complex ideas to diverse audiences. 

He works with many groups to improve decision-making and the communication of scientific facts. He currently co-chairs the Subcommittee on Open Science for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Before serving at National Science Foundation (NSF), he was Chair of the National Research Council’s Roundtable on the Application of Social and Behavioral Science Research and Chair of the Center for Open Science. He has served in many other leadership positions dedicated to increasing the social value of scientific research including membership on National Academies’ Advisory Board on the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, Chair of the AAAS Section on Social, Economic, and Political Sciences, President of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chair of American Political Science Association’s Task Force on Public Engagement.  

Lupia also has developed new means for researchers to better serve science and society.  As a founder of TESS (Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences), he has helped hundreds of scientists from many disciplines run innovative experiments on opinion formation and change using nationally representative subject pools.  As a Principal Investigator of the American National Election Studies, he brought many methodological innovations to the study that increased its usefulness and credibility. He helped to design the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) Summer Institutes and currently serves as its lead Principle Investigator (PI). As Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation, he led a repositioning of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate that led to a $100 million increase in funding within three years. 

He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and is one of the inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellows. His awards include the American Political Science Association’s Ithiel de Sola Pool Award, the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Mitovsky Innovator’s Award, and the National Academy of Sciences’ Initiatives in Research Award.