ICPSR Staff Celebrates Career of Mike Shove, Retiring after 25 Years
ANN ARBOR–ICPSR staff gathered on March 31, 2025, to celebrate the career of Mike Shove, a longtime presence in ICPSR’s Data Curation unit, who is retiring after more than 25 years of dedicated service at the University of Michigan.
Shove, a Research Area Specialist Lead on ICPSR’s Project Management User Support team, filled many roles over the years, including managing ICPSR’s member-funded data archive and helping curate and distribute the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG).
ICPSR Director Maggie Levenstein spoke about Shove being “quietly committed and responsible to ICPSR’s mission of creating and disseminating high-quality data, taking on new challenges and leadership roles” whenever possible.
ICPSR Archivist Emeritus Peter Granda thanked Shove for his work going above and beyond helping curate and disseminate the NSFG data. “He was really instrumental in getting the data out over the course of two decades,” Granda said, and noted that Shove was one of the key people who helped ICPSR partner with the Survey Research Center to archive the data.
Recently retired former Director of the ICPSR’s National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) Jim Mcnally remembered Shove’s “standardization and common-sense changes” to data processing that "really improved the overall look of ICPSR data.”
ICPSR’s Associate Director J. Trent Alexander spoke about Shove’s “extraordinary commitment” to his work, particularly with the NSFG.
David Beckley, a senior project manager at ICPSR, recalled being hired by Shove to work in the Data Curation unit. “Your excellent guidance and mentorship in SASS or SPSS … your knowledge of these packages and how to do the work was so deep, and I learned so much,” he said.
Shove spoke of living through the many changes in the data curation process over 25 years. “We have just grown,” he said. “I’m going to miss it.”
Contact: Dory Knight-Ingram
Apr 10, 2025