Karen S. Cook

I want to thank Jon Hennessy, the President of Stanford University, for his vision and support 
of multi-disciplinary research.  I think if there is one word that describes Jon it's been 
multi-disciplinary and support of those efforts on this campus.  To quote his remarks on the 
five year report that he made to the faculty senate last spring "Stanford as one of the great 
research institutions, has a responsibility to address challenges facing the world’s population 
in the next half century.  The scale and complexity of these problems demand collaboration 
across disciplines," and I would add across Universities.  Such efforts, John Hennessy noted, 
will require new funding and new facilities as well as different ways of organizing, teaching 
and research.  IRiSS is just one such venture on this campus and of course ISR at Michigan has 
a very long history of supporting cutting edge social science research and we honor that today 
as well.   

This is actually our institute's first major effort of this kind and we hope to be providing 
support for meeting such efforts collaboratively with other institutes and departments at 
Stanford and elsewhere in the future.  

I want to just take a moment to thank our staff, in particular Chris Thompson, who you may not 
be able to see,  who is the managing director of the institute, and helped behind the scenes to 
make this proposal possible.  The ANES has been described as one of the most influential social 
science projects in the World War II era.  We are excited to be Michigan's partner in this venture.  
All of us at Stanford, we are drinking champagne; I don’t know what you are drinking. But we are 
in fact celebrating, and I would like to thank Jon and Skip, for producing a wonderful and most 
importantly, fundable proposal.  

Jon…