July 20, 2026
The Stone Center awarded funding to three CUNY Graduate Center students and two Stone Center postdoctoral scholars to attend the LIS Introductory Summer Workshop from June 29 through July 3 in Luxembourg. The annual workshop is aimed at helping researchers in the social sciences conduct comparative research on income distribution, employment, and social policy.
The three GC students — Thomas Liess (Economics), Hedda Phan (Economics), and Megan Schwartz (Sociology) — and postdoctoral scholars Naomi Crowther and Marai Hayes received in-depth instruction on how to use the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS) and the Luxembourg Wealth Study Database (LWS). The LIS and LWS cross-national databases serve a global community of researchers, educators, and policymakers.
“Attending the LIS summer workshop was an incredible experience,” said Schwartz. “I now feel confident using LISSY [the remote-execution platform that allows researchers to analyze the LIS and LWS microdata from any location] in both Stata and R, and the applications of these new skills feel endless. In addition to the technical training, the workshop did an excellent job of demonstrating the wide diversity of research questions for which the LIS data are useful. The workshop sparked my own curiosity and creativity and made me really excited to dive into the data myself.”
Over the last two decades, about 30 Graduate Center students have attended the workshop. For the last 10 years, the Stone Center has been able to fund their attendance. Three are selected each year through an open competition. More than 800 young scholars — mostly doctoral students, postdocs, and assistant professors — have attended the LIS Workshop since its launch in 1988.
“The LIS Summer Workshop is legendary as a place to learn how to analyze socio-economic inequalities across countries and over time,” said Janet Gornick, director of the Stone Center, who has attended every LIS Workshop since 1990. “I’m always excited to help introduce young scholars to the LIS/LWS data and to supervise their related research. Few activities are more rewarding than attending these workshops, where I divide my time between lecturing, meeting one-on-one with young scholars from around the world, and introducing them to the world’s last remaining Grand Duchy!”
In addition to overseeing students at the LIS Workshop, Gornick regularly teaches a course at the Graduate Center that is focused on the LIS/LWS data. Each student carries out a semester-long empirical project culminating in a paper, many of which have been posted in the LIS Working Paper series. “I was thrilled when I noticed last week that three of the last six LIS Working Papers are authored by GC students. Over the years, several GC students’ LIS papers have gone on to peer-reviewed publication,” Gornick said.
Marai Hayes, a Stone Center postdoctoral scholar who focuses on health and economic outcomes, said the workshop exposed her to different methods that can be used to study inequality empirically. “I’m excited to apply what I learned and think about different ways to examine questions relating to health and economic inequality,” she said. “I had a great time learning about the data and making connections with other inequality scholars, and I came away with a much better sense of what’s included in the LIS database and how to use it.”
