Kathleen Mullan Harris (born October 13, 1950) [1] is a distinguished professor of sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [2] and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center.
She received a bachelor's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1972. [3] Then, she went on to receive a masters of arts and a doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979 and 1988 respectively. [3] Through her career as a sociologist, she specialized in research on social inequality based on family, poverty, and health. One important highlight upon her research include the 1996 Welfare Reform Act to support the low-income workforce population. [4]
Harris became the director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) where she led a team to follow the lives of 20,000 teens till adulthood to determine correlations between social inequality and health. [4] Due to her work offering a greater insight on the effects of nature and nurture on the social development of teenagers using the life course perspective, Harris was elected to become a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. [5]
Harris was awarded the Clifford C. Clogg award for early career achievement in population studies and demography from the Population Association of America and Research Institute of Pennsylvania State University in 2004. [3] Harris later became the elected president of the Population Association of America in 2008. [2] Afterwards, Harris received the Warren E. Miller award for meritorious service to the social sciences, which she was recognized for her work's impact to the field of social science in 2013. [2] Shortly after, Harris was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. [5] Harris received the Golden Goose award from the US Congress in 2016. [3] She was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow of 2019. [6]
Fiona Juliet Stanley is an Australian epidemiologist noted for her public health work, her research into child and maternal health as well as birth disorders such as cerebral palsy. Stanley is the patron of the Telethon Kids Institute and a distinguished professorial fellow in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Australia. From 1990 to December 2011 she was the founding director of Telethon Kids.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Kingsley Davis was an internationally recognized American sociologist and demographer. He was identified by the American Philosophical Society as one of the most outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century, and was a Hoover Institution senior research fellow.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where she focuses on affective science. She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review. Along with James Gross, she founded the Society for Affective Science.
Jennifer A. Richeson is an American social psychologist who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. In 2015, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Richeson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Amy B. Jordan is a Professor and Chair of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focuses on the role of media in the lives of children and their families, and the potential for communication messages to address health risk behaviors.
Michèle Lamont is a sociologist and is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change. She is the recipient of international prizes, such as the Gutenberg Award and the prestigious Erasmus award, for her "devoted contribution to social science research into the relationship between knowledge, power, and diversity." She has received honorary degrees from five countries. and been elected to several national honorary scientific societies. She served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2016 to 2017.
Alondra Nelson is an American academic, policy advisor, non-profit administrator, and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder chair and professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey. From 2021 to 2023, Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where she performed the duties of the director from February to October 2022. She was the first African American and first woman of color to lead OSTP. Prior to her role in the Biden Administration, she served for four years as president and CEO of the Social Science Research Council, an independent, nonpartisan international nonprofit organization. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she served as the inaugural dean of social science, as well as director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University.
Glen Holl Elder, Jr., is the Howard W. Odum Research Professor of Sociology (emeritus), a research professor of Psychology and a current professor at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are in social psychology, sociology, demographics and life course research. Elder's major work was Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience, in 1974. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences admitted Glen H. Elder in 1988. In 1993, he was honored with the Cooley-Mead Award by the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association. Elder was given honorary doctorates by the University of Bremen in 1999, by the Pennsylvania State University in 2003 and by the Ohio State University in 2005.
Sara McLanahan was an American sociologist. She is known for her work on the family as a major institution in the American stratification system. Her early work examined the consequences of divorce and remarriage for parents and children, and her later work focused on families formed by unmarried parents. She was interested in the effects of family structure on social inequality and the roles that public policies can play in addressing the needs of families and children.
Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell award from the American Economics Association in 2015.
Lenore Hilda Manderson is an Australian medical anthropologist. She is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, and the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, at Monash University, Australia.
Kathleen R. McKeown is an American computer scientist, specializing in natural language processing. She is currently the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science and is the Founding Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia University.
Linda H. Aiken, is an American nurse and researcher who is currently the Director for the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research and a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. She also is the Claire M. Fagin Leadership Professor of Nursing Science and a professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Christina Grozinger is an American entomologist, the Publius Vergilius Maro Professor of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University and the director at its Center for Pollinator Research.
Kathleen Thelen is an American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the Ford Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies (MPIfG), and a faculty associate at the Center for European Studies (CES) at Harvard University.
Emily Marjata Dorothea Grundy, is a British demographer and academic, specialising in ageing and health inequalities. Since 2013, she has been Professor of Demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She was previously Professor of Demographic Gerontology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) from 2003 to 2012, and Professor of Demography at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2013. From October 2017, she will be Professor of Population Science and Director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.
Deborah A. Lawlor is a British epidemiologist and professor at the University of Bristol, where she is the deputy director of the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit. She is also a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Her main areas of research are perinatal, reproductive and cardio-metabolic health. Lawlor was awarded a CBE in the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours for her services to social and community medicine research.
Pamela Herd is an American sociologist. As a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy, Herd's research focuses on inequality and how it intersects with health, aging, and policy.
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder is an American evolutionary anthropologist. She is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.