Data engineer helps scholars understand nuances of population data

Xan Wedel | Senior Research Data Engineer | Institute for Policy & Social Research

Social scientists, health scholars and policymakers often rely on complex population and geographic data to answer important questions. At the University of Kansas, many turn to Xan Wedel, whose expertise helps researchers navigate the nuances of those data and use them with confidence.

Wedel is the senior research data engineer at the Institute for Policy & Social Research. In 1999, she joined IPSR, which was then called the Institute for Public Policy & Business Research.

“Xan takes her job with great pride and is flexible with the many data requests that come her way. She truly loves the work she does and loves sharing her knowledge to help other researchers use the tools we have to help with their research,” said Jena Gunter, associate director of IPSR.

The statewide reports and datasets Wedel produces and maintains help faculty, staff, students, and local and state leaders answer questions about Kansas communities. She served on the state’s 2020 Census Complete Count Committee, helped organize Geographic Information Systems Day at KU from 2006 to 2017 and has contributed to 27 of the 60 editions of the Kansas Statistical Abstract. The publication is regularly used by Kansas municipalities to support economic development activities such as retail recruitment, grant applications and housing development decisions, according to a former Miami County official quoted in a news release announcing publication of the 2025 edition.

Colleagues say Wedel’s experience makes even the most complex research requests manageable. For one project, researchers needed a dataset identifying poverty rates, median household income and gross domestic product at the county level across the entire country. Because county boundaries have changed over time and statistical agencies handle those changes differently, assembling an accurate dataset required careful analysis. Wedel helped gather the data and determine where county definitions varied among agencies.

“This project would have taken weeks to complete,” Gunter said. “Xan provided the data in days.”