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The U.S. Census Bureau announced today the establishment of the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic and Other Populations and has named Kathleen Mullan Harris as a member of the committee.

The National Advisory Committee will advise the Census Bureau on a wide range of variables that affect the cost, accuracy and implementation of the Census Bureau's programs and surveys, including the once-a-decade census. The committee, which is comprised of 32 members from multiple disciplines, will advise the Census Bureau on topics such as housing, children, youth, poverty, privacy, race and ethnicity, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other populations.

“We expect that the expertise of this committee will help us meet emerging challenges the Census Bureau faces in producing statistics about our diverse nation,” said Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau's acting director. “By helping us better understand a variety of issues that affect statistical measurement, this committee will help ensure that the Census Bureau continues to provide relevant and timely statistics used by federal, state and local governments as well as business and industry in an increasingly technologically oriented society.”

The National Advisory Committee members, who serve at the discretion of the Census Bureau director, are chosen to serve based on expertise and knowledge of the cultural patterns, issues and/or statistical needs of hard-to-count populations.

Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family demography, the transition to adulthood, health disparities and family formation. Harris is director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a longitudinal study of more than 20,000 teens who are being followed into adulthood. Under Harris' leadership, the study has pioneered innovative designs and integrative multidisciplinary research to understand social, environmental, behavioral, biological and genetic linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. She is currently developing the study into a nationally representative intergenerational study to include the parents and children of respondents who are now in their 30s with parallel social, behavioral, biological and genetic data across three generations. Harris received her doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded the 2004 Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America and was president of the Population Association of America in 2009.