AAPOR is governed by a 15-member executive council elected by the full membership each Spring. To ensure consistency in the leadership, the past and incoming presidents work closely with the current president; and current and incoming (associate) Council members also work together.

President Nancy A. Mathiowetz, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.  Her career in survey methodology has included service in the private sector (Westat, Inc.), the federal government (including the Bureau of the Census and the Department of Health and Human Services) and most recently, the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland.  She has served as associate editor for Public Opinion Quarterly and the Journal of Official Statistics, and is coeditor of the volume, Measurement Errors in Surveys.  She has published on various topics related to survey methodology and the assessment of the quality of survey data  in venues ranging from the Journal of the American Public Health Association to the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics.  Mathiowetz earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin, a master’s degree in biostatistics from the University of Michigan, and  doctorate degree in sociology, also from the University of Michigan.  

President-elect Richard A. (Dick) Kulka, Ph.D.,  is Senior Vice President at Abt Associates Inc, where he has corporate oversight for the Survey Methodology and Data Capture Group and Strategic Business Development He has had the good fortune of serving on the staff of four major research organizations that span most of the institutional sectors of AAPOR’s membership--the SRC at Michigan (1975-1980), RTI (1980- 1989; 1994-2005), NORC at the University of Chicago (1989-1994) and Abt Associates. He has been involved in the design, conduct, and analysis of numerous statistical surveys on health, mental health, and other social policy issues for over 25 years, while also conducting a broad range of applied research on survey research methods.

AAPOR past president Robert P. Daves is a market and opinion research consultant based in Minnesota. His research focuses on public affairs and election polling for the news media, strategic audience research for newspapers and web sites, and market and customer research for industries ranging from finance to health care. He also serves as a senior associate with The Everett Group, specializing in audience analysis and public opinion research for military and other government clients. Prior to his training in public opinion research, Daves worked as a reporter, copy editor and news editor. 

Daves was a member of the team that received AAPOR's 2003 Innovator's Award for his work in helping the profession develop measurements to understand non-response bias in surveys.  Rob earned an M.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.S. in sociology (magna cum laude) from Western Carolina University.

Secretary/Treasurer Dawn V. Nelson, is Special Surveys Branch Chief within the Demographic Surveys Division -U.S. Census Bureau, holds a B.A. (psychology) and an M.A. (applied survey research), both from the University of Michigan. She has over 20 years of survey work experience, including commercial research on the client-side (General Motors, GTE) and vendor-side (PriceWaterhouseCoopers), academic (University of Michigan – Survey Research Center) and, most extensively, federal government ( U.S. Census Bureau).

Associate Secretary/Treasurer Kate Stewart, is a partner in the firm Belden Russonello & Stewart, where she directs all phases of survey and focus group research for non-profit organizations and others.  Her areas of research include public attitudes on the environment, civil liberties, and education. Kate received her MS from the Joint Program in Survey Methodology from the University of Maryland and her undergraduate degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. In the past, Kate has been an adjunct professor at American University and has taught classes in public communication research. Kate currently serves on APPOR’s Committee on Education, which has responsibility for coordinating the short course offerings at the annual meeting and working on outreach to audiences outside the research community to build the identity and work of AAPOR.

Conference Chair Frank Newport, Ph.D.,  is Editor in Chief of The Gallup
Poll in Princeton, New Jersey.  He is the author of Polling Matters -Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People (Warner Books, 2004) and coauthor with Stuart Rothenberg of The Evangelical Voter.  With Alec Gallup, he is the coeditor of The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 2004, 2005 and 2006. His articles and op-ed pieces have appeared in many publications, including the American Sociological Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

Newport earned a bachelor's degree from Baylor University and a master's and doctorate degree in sociology from the University of Michigan. He taught sociology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, was a talk show host at KTRH Radio in Houston, and became a partner at a Houston market and public opinion research company before moving to Princeton to
take his current position with Gallup.

Associate Conference Chair Vincent Price, Ph.D. is the Steven H. Chaffee Professor of Communication and Political Science in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his doctorate at Stanford University and was formerly chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan.

He has written extensively on mass communication and public opinion, social influence processes, and political communication, and his work has been published in five languages. The recipient of awards for his teaching and research, he is currently pursuing studies on the role of online discussion in shaping public opinion. He has been an advisor to the Canadian Election Study, and currently serves on advisory boards for the National Annenberg Election Survey and the American National Election Studies.

Standards Chair Charlotte Steeh, Ph.D., is a Consultant on Survey Methodology working under contract at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her research has focused recently on the new technologies that are affecting telephone surveys and on finding procedures that will integrate mobile telephones into RDD samples. She has extended her research to include Voice over Internet Protocol.

As a member of the faculty at Georgia State University from 1997 to 2005, Charlotte was Director of the Survey Research Laboratory in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, and Associate Research Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Urban Studies. She also directed the Detroit Area Study at the University of Michigan for six years and lectured in the Department of Sociology. She received her graduate education at the University of Michigan obtaining her doctorate in 1975. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology and published in a variety of journals.  

Associate Standards Chair Mary Losch, Ph.D.,  is Associate Professor of Psychology and the Assistant Director of the University of Northern Iowa Center for Social and Behavioral Research. She received her Ph.D at the University of Iowa where she studied attitudes and psychophysiology with John Cacioppo. She worked in the private sector as a survey research analyst at Frank Magid Associates and then returned to UI as Program Director of the newly established Social Science Institute in 1988. A decade later, she became the Assistant Director of the UNI Center for Social and Behavioral Research. She has conducted a host of survey projects including a number in the areas of public policy, health, and health policy. She has published research in survey methods, social science and health disciplines. Her own funded research focuses on maternal and child health behaviors and attitudes. At UI, she served as vice-chair of the social science IRB and served on the committee charged with drafting the institution’s conflict of interest policy. At UNI, she serves on the IRB and chaired the committee from 2001-2006.

Membership/Chapter Relations Chair Carl Ramirez has worked since 1991 at the Government Accountability Office, where he works in the Survey Policy and Coordination Group in GAO's Center for Design, Methods and Analysis. His interests include establishment survey methods, web survey design, and confidentiality and disclosure issues. Carl's undergraduate degree from Princeton was in operations research. He studied for two years in the sociology department at the University of Chicago.

Associate Membership/Chapter Relations Chair Adam Safir is a Statistician at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prior to joining BLS, he served on the research staff of RTI International, the Urban Institute, Arbitron, and the University of Maryland Survey Research Center. His primary research interests include methods of questionnaire evaluation, the assessment of nonresponse bias, and related topics in the methodology of consumer expenditure surveys. He completed his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Maryland (B.A. in Sociology, master's degree in Marketing Research).

Communications Chair Mark Blumenthal is the editor and publisher of the weblog Pollster.com (formerly MysteryPollster.com), which provides daily running commentary that explains, demystifies and critiques political polling. Since September 2006, the site has over one million unique visits resulting in over 4.1 million page views and won numerous plaudits from respected bloggers and journalists. The National Council on Public Polls awarded MysteryPollster a special citation for its work explaining polls to the Internet reader.

Blumenthal has twenty years of experience in public opinion research at the DC-based political polling firm, Bennett, Petts and Blumenthal and before that as an analyst with Hickman-Maslin Research and Greenberg-Lake: The Analysis Group. He earned a Political Science degree with high honors from the University of Michigan and completed course work towards a Masters degree at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland. He has served as a guest lecturer at the Communications School at American University, the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and at training seminars sponsored by EMILY's List, the Democratic National Committee and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.

Associate Communications Chair J. Michael (Mike) Brick Ph.D., is a Vice President at Westat, where he is Director of the Survey Methods Unit. He is also a research professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland, where he has taught graduate courses since the inception of the program in 1993. Before joining Westat in 1984, he was with the federal government for 11 years.

He is an editor for Survey Methodology (2001- present),  has served on the Editorial Board for Public Opinion Quarterly (2003-2006), is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute.

His primary research interests are sample design and estimation for large surveys, the theory and practice of telephone surveys including surveying cell phones, nonresponse and bias evaluation, survey quality control, longitudinal surveys, and multi-mode multi-frame survey design. 

Councillor- at- Large Mark Schulman, Ph.D., is a founder and President of Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. (SRBI), His work has spanned both market and public policy re­search for government, foundations, universities, and major corporations. Schulman directs all SRBI surveys for Time Magazine and directs many of SRBI’s major public policy surveys.

Schulman specializes in public policy, opinion research, segmentation design, and international research. He served for many years on the Decision Desk at Voter News Service, an organization owned by the major television networks and the Associated Press, which projected election outcomes. Dr. Schulman is now a consultant on the ABC News Election Unit Decision Desk.

He lectures frequently at universities and conferences on research methods and has taught at several universities, including Rutgers, where he was a Senior Project Director of the Eagleton Institute Poll. His graduate degrees were awarded by the University of Wisconsin, Madison (M.A.) and by Rutgers University (Ph.D.).

Councillor-at-Large Scott Keeter, Ph.D., is director of survey research for the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC. He was in academia for much of his career, most recently at George Mason University from 1998 to 2002, and previously at Rutgers University and Virginia Commonwealth University, where he also directed the Survey Research Laboratory from 1988-1991.

 Since 1980 he has been an election night analyst of exit polls for NBC News and has provided consultation on survey design and analysis for a variety of organizations. He is author or co-author of papers on non-response bias, telephone survey coverage problems, and other topics in survey methodology, political communications and behavior, and health care. He is also co-author of four books on subjects ranging from political participation and knowledge to religion and politics.