Dan Gaylin is the Ralph Muller President & CEO of NORC at the University of Chicago. He joined NORC in 2000 and has led the organization since 2013. Under his leadership, NORC has more than tripled its revenue and launched a series of leading-edge research, analytics, and dissemination initiatives, including The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, AmeriSpeak^®, NORC VizStudio, the Center for Survey Panel Sciences, the GSS Data Explorer, and NORC Labs.

Founded in 1941, NORC is an objective, nonpartisan, global research institution with primary offices in Chicago and Washington, DC, and regional locations across the United States. It conducts more than $360 million in annual research for government, nonprofit, and business clients in the United States and over 80 countries. NORC's work spans the full range of human experience—economics and the workforce, education and learning, international development, health and well-being, and society and public affairs—and the organization is known for scientific rigor and for advancing the methods, scope, and accessibility of modern research.

A widely recognized expert in health policy and program evaluation, Dan brings 35 years of experience across government, private consulting, and nonprofit research. His work is marked by leadership of long-term, multimillion-dollar projects that combine primary data collection, analysis of existing data, and qualitative methods to distill complex information into recommendations for improving policy, programs, and practice. He led the development of the congressionally mandated evaluation of the Children's Health Insurance Program and directed several major patient care demonstration evaluations for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Before joining NORC, Dan was a senior advisor for research and planning in the Office of Health Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where he managed a portfolio of research informing Secretarial-level policy initiatives and chaired or co-chaired HHS-wide workgroups reporting to the Secretary or the White House on prescription drug policy, children's health insurance, and departmental research coordination. Earlier, he was a vice president at The Lewin Group, a health care consultancy, and a research associate and program director at the Urban Institute.

Dan speaks frequently in the United States and abroad on the effective use of data to inform decision-making, the democratization of data, transparency, and data literacy—emphasizing data quality and the imperative to keep people, communities, and civil society at the center of data collection and analysis in a rapidly evolving digital world. He has published widely in leading peer-reviewed journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs.

In 2025, Dan published Fact Forward: The Perils of Bad Information and the Promise of a Data-Savvy Society, which guides readers through the data pipeline—how data are gathered and analyzed, and how to tell trustworthy data from untrustworthy—and calls for greater transparency from data producers, stronger data literacy among communicators and consumers, and a societal commitment to data education and infrastructure.