Timothy Mulcahy

Timothy M. Mulcahy is a program area director in the Economics, Labor, and Population Studies department at NORC at the University of Chicago. He is also Project Director of the NORC Data Enclave, and Co-Principal Investigator of an R21 grant examining illicit retail drug markets across the U.S., sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Mulcahy has nearly 20 years of experience in social science research developing and implementing complex, data-centric projects involving sensitive data, evidence-based research, and data warehousing. His areas of expertise include criminal justice and drug policy, secure remote data access technology, data privacy, statistical disclosure control, and confidentiality. He has served as an invited speaker, keynote, panel chair, and panelist at numerous conferences, workshops, and seminars and has published widely on digital age dissemination, data access modalities, data privacy and confidentiality, and statistical disclosure control.

Prior to 2004, Mulcahy served as senior analyst at Justice Studies, Inc. where he completed two congressionally mandated studies for the National Institute of Justice, one examining the federal death penalty system and the other involving human trafficking in the U.S. Before that, he served as survey manager at Mathematica Policy Research.

Mulcahy has published in the Journal of Technology Transfer, Journal of Transactions on Data Privacy, Criminal Justice, Criminal Justice Policy Review, and the Journal of Drug Issues. He also is a referee for Survey Methodology and peer reviewer and proposal evaluator for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Mulcahy's research on illicit drug markets recently received a first-place blue ribbon award at the Association of Public Policy and Management for its innovative approach to improving public policy through web-enhanced, geo-coded qualitative interviews.

In 2013, Mulcahy was appointed to the Illinois State Economic Data Task Force, and he was appointed to the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality. On May 31, 2013, Tim served as a keynote speaker at the 39th Annual International Association of Social Science Services and Technology Conference in Cologne, Germany.