CPC at 60: Carolina Population Center’s Greatest Strength Remains Its People, Says Robert Hummer
By Grayson Mendenhall
gkm4unc@email.unc.edu
As the Carolina Population Center celebrates its 60th anniversary, one of its senior researchers says the center’s enduring success comes from a simple but increasingly rare feature in academia: bringing people together.
For Robert Hummer, a professor of sociology at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), the center’s ability to foster collaboration across disciplines is what sets it apart.
“The Carolina Population Center is a crown jewel of the social sciences, and really one of the crown jewels of the University of North Carolina,” Hummer said.
Founded in 1966, CPC has spent six decades supporting research on population dynamics, health, and social change. Today, researchers from fields including sociology, epidemiology, geography, anthropology, economics, social medicine, and public health work side by side on projects that often span multiple disciplines.
That environment was one of the main reasons Hummer came to UNC in 2015.
Collaborating across disciplines
Prior to arriving in Chapel Hill, Hummer spent much of his career at the University of Texas at Austin, another major population research institution. While he had long worked in population science, he said CPC offered a level of interdisciplinary engagement unlike any he had experienced before.
“When I got here, my office neighbors on either side were from the School of Public Health,” Hummer said. “There were anthropologists and geographers and economists all around me. I’d never worked in a setting like that.”
Today, Hummer leads Add Health. The landmark project has followed a cohort of Americans since the mid-1990s, tracking how social, behavioral, and environmental factors influence health across the life course. Participants who entered the study as adolescents are now approaching age 50.
Hummer said CPC’s collaborative culture has strengthened both the center’s research output and the scientists who work there.
“It’s not just that people from different disciplines are in the same building,” he said. “We’re learning from each other all the time.”
Bringing scholars together
Those interactions take place through weekly seminars, federally funded training programs, and everyday conversations in hallways and shared spaces.
The center’s Friday seminar series, for example, regularly brings together students, faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and visiting researchers to discuss new findings and emerging questions. CPC’s training programs – of one which Hummer co-directs with Amanda Thompson from the Department of Anthropology –similarly attract scholars from diverse academic backgrounds and encourage them to learn from one another.
“For students and postdocs especially, it’s an opportunity to see different ways of approaching the same problem,” Hummer said.
He believes those face-to-face interactions remain critical, even as remote work and virtual meetings have become more common.
“There’s something about being in the same space,” Hummer said. “Conversations happen that you never planned to have, and those conversations often lead to new ideas.”
One of the biggest surprises of his time at CPC, he said, has been seeing just how effectively the center breaks down traditional academic silos.
“People often talk about interdisciplinary science,” Hummer said. “Here, it’s actually happening.”
Optimism despite an uncertain future
Yet CPC’s 60th anniversary arrives during a period of uncertainty for research institutions across the country. Hummer pointed to reductions in federal research funding and broader financial challenges affecting universities and scientific organizations.
Those pressures have made recent years difficult, he said, particularly for early-career researchers and students preparing to enter a competitive job market.
Even so, Hummer remains optimistic.
Part of that optimism comes from Add Health, which he described as “a gem of science” and a continuing source of excitement throughout his career. But an equally important source of motivation is the next generation of scholars passing through CPC’s halls.
“The students and postdocs are energizing,” he said. “They’re smart, they’re creative, and they bring new ideas.”
As CPC marks six decades of population research, Hummer sees that blend of mentorship, collaboration, and discovery as the center’s defining legacy.
“Everybody brings something different to the table,” he said. “And together, we do better science.”