Appendix C
Biographical Sketches of Steering
Committee Members and Presenters
STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS
David B. Grusky (Cochair) is professor of sociology at Stanford University, director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, founder and coeditor of Pathways Magazine, and coeditor of the Stanford University Press Social Inequality Series. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the 2004 Max Weber Award, founder of the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality, and a former Presidential Young Investigator. His recent books include Occupy the Future (2012), The New Gilded Age (2012), The Great Recession (2011), The Inequality Reader (2011), The Inequality Puzzle (2010), Social Stratification (2008), Poverty and Inequality (2006), Mobility and Inequality (2006), Occupational Ghettos (2004), The Declining Significance of Gender? (2006), and Classic Readings in Race, Class, and Gender (2006). He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
C. Matthew Snipp (Cochair) is the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford professor of humanities and sciences in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. He is also the director for the Institute for Research in the Social Science’s Secure Data Center and formerly directed Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. Before moving to Stanford in 1996, he was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been a research fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has published three books and more than 70 articles
and book chapters on demography, economic development, poverty, and unemployment. His current research and writing deals with the methodology of racial measurement, changes in the social and economic well-being of American ethnic minorities, and American Indian education. For nearly 10 years, he served as an appointed member of the Census Bureau’s Racial and Ethnic Advisory Committee. He also has been involved with several advisory working groups evaluating the 2000 census and three National Academy of Sciences panels focused on the 2010 and 2020 censuses. He has served as a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics, as well as an elected member of the Council of the Inter-University Consortium of Political and Social Research. He is currently serving on the National Institute of Child Health and Development’s Population Science Subcommittee. Snipp holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Henry E. Brady is dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and Class of 1941 Monroe Deutsch professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written on electoral politics and political participation, social welfare policy, political polling, and statistical methodology, and has worked for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget and other organizations in Washington, DC. He has previously served as president of the American Political Science Association, president of the Political Methodology Society of the American Political Science Association, and director of the University of California’s Survey Research Center. He is coauthor of Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992), Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995), Expensive Children in Poor Families: The Intersection of Childhood Disability and Welfare (2000), and Counting All the Votes: The Performance of Voting Technology in the United States (2001). He is coeditor of Rethinking Social Inquiry (2004), Capturing Campaign Effects (2006), and the Handbook of Political Methodology (2008). Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006. He received his Ph.D. in economics and political science from MIT in 1980.
Michael Hout is the Natalie Cohen professor of sociology and demography at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches courses on inequality, data analysis, and population. In his research, he uses demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. Publications that exemplify this approach include, with Claude
Fischer, Century of Difference (2006); with Andrew Greeley, The Truth About Conservative Christians (2006); “How Class Works: Subjective Aspects of Class Since the 1970s” in Social Class: How Does It Work?, edited by Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley (2008); “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change” (American Journal of Sociology, September 2001); and “How 4 Million Irish Immigrants Came to Be 40 Million Irish Americans” (with Josh Goldstein, American Sociological Review, April 1994). Other previous books are Following in Father’s Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland (1989) and, with five Berkeley colleagues, Inequality by Design (1996). His honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997, National Academy of Sciences in 2003, and American Philosophical Society in 2006. He currently chairs the Demography Department, the Graduate Group in Sociology and Demography, and the Berkeley Population Center. Before moving to Berkeley in 1985, he taught at the University of Arizona. He holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in sociology.
Robert D. Mare is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he has been a member of the faculty since 1998. At UCLA, he served as the founding director of the California Center for Population Research from 1998 to 2003. For 20 years prior to that, he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of research expertise include social stratification, demography, and quantitative research methods with a focus on the connection between demographic processes and social inequality. He has conducted studies on inequality in educational opportunities, social mobility, youth unemployment, socioeconomic differences in mortality, residential segregation by income and race, residential mobility, marriage markets, family structure and poverty, migration, and statistical methods. Mare has been a Guggenheim fellow, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a winner of the American Sociological Association Methodology Section’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award. He has been a visiting professor at Tel Aviv University, visiting senior social scientist at RAND, visiting fellow at New College, Oxford, and former editor of Demography. In 2010, he was president of the Population Association of America. From 2006 to 2010, he was president of the Research Committee on Social Stratification of the International Sociological Association. In 2010, he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan.
Sara S. McLanahan is the William S. Tod professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. She is the founding director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing and a prin-
cipal investigator of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. She is editor-in-chief of the Future of Children. Her research interests include family demography, poverty and inequality, and social policy. She has written five books, including Fathers Under Fire (1998), Social Policies for Children (1996), Growing Up with a Single Parent (1994), Child Support and Child Wellbeing (1994), and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (1986), and more than 100 scholarly articles. McLanahan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is a past-president of the Population Association of America and has served on the boards of the American Sociological Association, Population Association of America, and the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council’s Board on Children, Youth, and Families. She currently serves on the boards of the William T. Grant Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Sean Reardon is professor of education and (by courtesy) sociology at Stanford University. He specializes in research on the effects of educational policy on educational and social inequality; on the causes, patterns, trends, and consequences of social and educational inequality; and in applied statistical methods for educational research. His primary research examines the relative contribution of family, school, and neighborhood environments to racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequality (including measurement of segregation and achievement gaps), and methods of causal inference in educational and social science research. He teaches graduate courses in applied statistical methods, with a particular emphasis on the application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods to the investigation of issues of educational policy and practice. He has been a recipient of a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award, a Carnegie Scholar Award, and a National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship. He received his doctorate in education from Harvard University.
Timothy M. (Tim) Smeeding is the arts and sciences distinguished professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin– Madison and director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. Recent publications include From Parents to Children, coedited with John Ermisch and Markus Jantti (2012); The American Welfare State: Laggard or Leader? with Irv Garfinkel and Lee Rainwater (2010); and Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting: The Comparative Study of Intergenerational Mobility, with Robert Erikson and Markus Jantti (2011). His recent work has been on national and cross-national studies of mobility across generations, inequality of income consumption and wealth, and the measurement of poverty in
a national and cross-national context. He advises several national and international research projects on intergenerational mobility, economic inequality, and public policy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the
PRESENTERS
Bhashkar “Bhash” Mazumder is a senior economist in the Economic Research Department and executive director of the Chicago Census Research Data Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. As a member of the microeconomic team, Mazumder conducts research in labor economics, education, and health. His recent research has focused on the long-term effects of poor health early in life. Mazumder previously worked at the Conference Board in New York and oversaw the transfer of the leading economic indicators from the U.S. Commerce Department to The Conference Board. Mazumder received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Chandra L. Muller is professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research is on how family, community, education policy, and health behaviors shape education and the transition to adulthood. In particular, she focuses on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) preparation and careers. Of primary interest is the diversity in experiences and disparities according to gender, race and ethnicity, and social class, as well as disability, immigration, or language minority status. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
Laura Tach is assistant professor of policy analysis and management and a sociologist who studies how social policies intersect with demographic and economic changes in American society. Prior to joining the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research examines how social policies affect urban poverty and family life. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and social policy at Harvard University.
Florencia Torche is associate professor of sociology at New York University (NYU), faculty affiliate at the Steinhardt School of Education, and research affiliate at InSPIRES, NYU School of Medicine. Her scholarship examines inequality dynamics—how inequality persists over the life course and across generations. She has studied inequality of educational opportunity, intergenerational mobility, wealth disparities, assortative mating, and the early emergence of disadvantage. Much of her research uses an international comparative perspective. She has conducted several
surveys, including the first national surveys of social mobility in Chile and in Mexico. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University.
Stephen Trejo is associate professor of economics and associate director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on public policy issues, including overtime pay regulation, the labor market experiences of immigrants, and obstacles to the economic progress of minority groups. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
John Robert Warren is professor of sociology and director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. His recent work investigates the impact of state-mandated high school exit examinations on high school dropout rates, student academic achievement, and postsecondary labor market outcomes. In other work, he is investigating the degree to which associations between socioeconomic status and health can be attributed to the characteristics and conditions of paid employment. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.
