Parcel Appointed Program Director at NSF

Toby Parcel, professor of sociology at NC State, will serve as a program director with the National Science Foundation for at least one year beginning September 5, 2017. Her appointment is part of NSF’s rotating program director initiative through which university faculty work at the federal agency for one or two years.

As a sociology program director, Parcel will help implement the NSF review process to determine which sociology proposals will be recommended for funding. She will  work with program directors in other divisions and directorates to pursue NSF objectives. And she’ll conduct outreach to inform sociologists about how NSF works and to encourage them to submit research proposals. Her one-year term is renewable for a second year.

“I am very excited about this opportunity to contribute to the larger discipline of sociology and the scientific community more generally,” she said.

Parcel joined the faculty at NC State in 2006, and served as dean of Humanities and Social Sciences for two years. Parcel previously served as dean of Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, and had chaired the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. She is the author, with professor of political science Andrew Taylor, of The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods and the Politics of Public School Assignments (UNC Press, 2015), among other scholarly works.