The Academy designed this study to act as a roadmap for transportation policy-makers, students, and concerned citizens. Calling for changes in policies and social habits, the resulting report offered strategies to minimize and resolve the problems raised by the increasing use of automobiles in urban areas.

In 1977, nearly twenty-five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision found that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the aftershocks were still affecting American society. The Academy convened an interdisciplinary study group to examine the post-Brown urban school integration experience and to consider solutions to ongoing education inequality in American classrooms.

New Dilemmas in Ethics, Technology and War is a three-year study exploring the intricate, rapidly evolving relationship between advancements in military technology and the moral and ethical dilemmas that new technologies pose for states, international organizations, and global society. 

The Academy co-sponsored a conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, that invited philosophers and political scientists to examine what was driving the global resurgence of nationalism and to discuss how the conflicts it engenders can be resolved.

This multi-pronged project examined shifts in the boundaries between the internal affairs of member states whose sovereignty is protected by the United Nations Charter and those matters which the U.N. and other international organizations deem to be within their cognizance.

The pervasive challenge of housing affordability requires a comprehensive approach in response. The Academy's project on housing solutions explores and highlights a particular local approach. The focus is on how anchor institutions—universities and colleges, faith-based organizations, and philanthropies—can facilitate affordable housing solutions in their communities.

This project focused on the meaning of “public interest” communication in a 500-channel marketplace, with particular emphasis on television’s failure to fulfill its potential as an educational medium.

This commission is dedicated to ensuring all students, especially historically underserved students, can thrive and find rewarding jobs in an ever-changing global economy, empowering them to actively engage in society. 

Drawing from national leaders in education, business, and government, this commission analyzed the current state of undergraduate education and offers recommendations to improve the quality of student learning, increase college completion rates, and ensure all students have access to an affordable postsecondary education.

Located around the globe but operated by American parent institutions, interdisciplinary American Overseas Advanced Research Centers provide essential support to American humanistic and social science scholars working in foreign countries.

This project focused on the critical importance of civic engagement to issues of democratization and economic development, in the U. S. and in developing countries with the aim of sharpening the concept of “social capital” — that is, social networks, norms, institutions and trust — through sustained dialogue among social theorists and empirical researchers.

The focus of this study was to better understand the role of Confucianism - long thought to be incompatible with the spirit of capitalism - in industrialization.

Using Chicago as a case study, this study of the future of the American metropolis addressed the challenges facing metropolitan areas in spheres such as public transportation, land use and housing, governance and taxation, and economic well-being.

The ARISE project and its resulting report sought to foster a new generation of scientists and stimulate innovation to generate competitive advantage in a global economy.

The Academy gathered together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to design a study of environmental decision-making that focused on the theoretical aspects of the process and examined policy analysis and decision-making.

In 1994, the Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) hosted the first major international workshop on the dangers posed by the increased proliferation of small arms and light weapons to areas of conflict around the world.

The Academy hosted a conference to allow scholars an opportunity to systematically analyze the critical issues involved with chemical weapons policy and to develop a framework for official deliberations among nations.

For this project, the Academy co-sponsored a series of symposia and conferences to examine censorship from a variety of perspectives. In the resulting volume of essays, an interdisciplinary group of scholars analyzed efforts to regulate speech and examined the subsequent cultural implications.

This project studied the influence of Paul Tillich⁠—a distinguished philosophical and cultural theologian and an eminent interpreter of the 20th century⁠—on contemporary life.

This study investigated the rationale, the means, and the consequences of providing high-quality primary and secondary education to all the world's children.