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Title: A Scholar’s Long View Across the Career of Ilsa S. Lottes

United States, 21st Jul 2026 - Ilsa S. Lottes has spent nearly six decades circling a single, deceptively difficult question. How do you measure something as contested, and as easy to invoke and hard to define, as a right? It is a question she has asked as a mathematician, a statistician, a sexologist, and, most recently, as the author of a book turning that same empirical instinct on the state of human welfare in America.Her path there was anything but linear. Lottes began her academic life in mathematics, earning a B.S. from Purdue University in 1965, graduating with distinction in the School of Science, followed by an M.S. in 1967. For the next several years, she taught mathematics in classrooms in Indiana and Pennsylvania, work that included designing curricula and authoring instructional manuals for the Hatboro-Horsham School District outside Philadelphia.It was a solid, useful career, and she might have stayed in it. Instead, in the early 1980s, she found her way to the University of Pennsylvania, where she began work as a research methodologist and statistical consultant for graduate students in Penn’s sexuality program. That role became early evidence of the pairing that would define her scholarship, applying rigorous measurement to subjects most people treat as matters of opinion. She completed her Ph.D. in Measurement and Evaluation at Penn in 1986, earning a meritorious rating on her dissertation and oral defense.From there, Lottes moved to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as an assistant professor in 1988. She would remain at UMBC for the rest of her academic career, rising to associate professor in 1995 and to full professor in 2011, a tenure spanning more than three decades in which she taug...

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