Bobby Austin is Vice President for University Relations at the University of the District of Columbia, founder of the Village Foundation, which focused on the development of African American men, and Chair of the “State of the African American Male” initiative of the Congressional Black Caucus. Dr. Austin is editor of the groundbreaking report Repairing the Breach: Key Ways to Support Family Life, Reclaim our Streets and Rebuild Civil Society in American Communities and coauthor of Wake up and Start to Live: an Analysis of a Gallup Poll and a Statistical Profile of African American Men 1990-2000.
Michael Barone is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a Senior Writer at U.S. News & World Report. He is the author of several books, including Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America's Founding Fathers, and Hard America, Soft America: Competition versus Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future, as well as principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.
Frank Bean is Chancellor's Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for Research on Immigration, Population and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the UCI faculty, he served as Ashbel Smith Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Director of the Population Research Center, and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also the founding Director of both the Program for Research on Immigration Policy and the Population Studies Center at The Urban Institute in Washington, DC. He is the co-author (with Gillian Stevens) of America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity.
Lawrence D. Bobo is the Martin Luther King Jr. Centennial Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Program in African and African American Studies at Stanford University. He is co-author of the award winning book Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, senior editor for Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles, and co-editor of Racialized Politics: The Debate On Racism in America. His most recent book is entitled Prejudice in Politics: Public Opinion, Group Position, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute.
Linda Burton is James B. Duke Professor of Sociology at Duke University. She is currently one of six principal investigators involved in a multi-site, multi-method collaborative study of the impact of welfare reform on families and children (Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study). She directs the ethnographic component of the Three-City Study and is also principal investigator of an ethnographic study of rural poverty and child development (The Family Life Project).
Camille Zubrinsky Charles is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Faculty Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Won’t You Be My Neighbor: Race, Class and Residence in Los Angeles, which examines cross-cutting, individual-level factors thought to influence aggregate housing patterns, and coauthor of The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America’s Selective Colleges and Universities. Her research interests are in the areas of racial inequality, racial attitudes and intergroup relations, racial residential segregation, and minorities in higher education.
Andrew Cherlin is Griswold Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University. In 1999, he was president of the Population Association of America. In 2003 he received the Distinguished Career Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association. In 2005-2006 he was Guggenheim Foundation Fellow. His recent articles include "The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage," Journal of Marriage and Family and "Family Instability and Child Well-Being," American Sociological Review (with Paul Fomby).
Kathryn Edin is Professor of Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research focuses on urban poverty and family life, social welfare, public housing, child support, and non-marital childbearing and the economic lives of the poor. Her most recent publication is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (with Maria J. Kefalas). She is also coauthor of Making Ends Meet: How Low Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work. Current projects include an in-depth study nested within the interim evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment and an in-depth longitudinal study of the Gautreaux Two program.
Richard B. Freeman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER.) His research interests include the growth and decline of unions; self-organizing non-unions in the labor market; restructuring European welfare states; international labor standards; transitional economies; Chinese labor markets; crime; income distribution and equity in the marketplace; the effects of immigration and trade on inequality; and the job market for scientists and engineers. His recent publications include What Workers Want and America Works: The Exceptional Labor Market.
Frank Furstenberg is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology and a Research Associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on issues relating to family change over the past four decades. His most recent book, Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teenage Childbearing, is being published by Russell Sage this fall. His current research examines the well-being of middle-income families in North America and Europe.
Ron Haskins is a Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program and Co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey Foundation. He is the author of Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law and a Senior Editor of The Future of Children, a journal on policy issues that affect children and families. In 2002 he was the Senior Advisor to the President for Welfare Policy.
Harry J. Holzer is a Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a Visiting Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington DC. He is a former Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, a Senior Affiliate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan and a Research Affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Holzer's books include The Black Youth Employment Crisis (co-edited with Richard Freeman); What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers; Employers and Welfare Recipients: The Effects of Welfare Reform in the Workplace (with Michael Stoll); Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner); and Reshaping the American Workforce in a Changing Economy (co-edited with Demetra Nightingale).
Diana Karafin is a Ph.D. candidate at Ohio State University, whose research focuses on consequences of neighborhood integration, racial democracy and crime, and discrimination in the housing and labor markets.
Sara McLanahan is the William S. Tod Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, the principal investigator on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and the editor-in-chief of The Future of Children, a journal on child and youth policy. She is a former president of the Population Association of America and a former member of the NAS/IOM Board on Children Youth and Families. Her research interests include family demography, poverty and inequality, and social policy. She has written/edited 8 books and over 100 scholarly articles.
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. His most recent books are Strangers in a Strange Land: Humans in an Urbanizing World and Return of the L-Word: A Liberal Vision for the New Century. He is also coauthor of the award winning books American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass and Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration.
Omar McRoberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, with a focus on the sociology of religion, urban sociology, social policy, urban poverty, and collective action. His first book, Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Urban Neighborhood, explains the high concentration, wide variety, and ambiguous social impact of religious activity in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Boston. McRoberts currently is conducting a study of black religious responses to, and influences on, social welfare policy since the New Deal, culminating with George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Lawrence O’Donnell, Jr., Senior Political Analyst for MSNBC and panelist on “The McLaughlin Group,” served as Senior Adviser to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was formerly Executive Producer of NBC’s “The West Wing” and a contributing editor of New York Magazine, where he wrote a column on national politics. In 1992, when Senator Moynihan became Chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, Mr. O’Donnell served as Chief of Staff of the committee. From 1993 through 1995, Mr. O’Donnell was Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance.
Devah Pager is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Faculty Associate of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Her research focuses on institutions affecting racial stratification, including education, labor markets, and the criminal justice system. Pager's current research has involved a series of field experiments studying discrimination against minorities and ex-offenders in the low-wage labor market. Recent publications include, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration and "Walking the Talk: What Employers Say versus What They Do" (with Lincoln Quillian).
Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard. His work addresses, in comparative/historical terms, the interactive causal role of culture and seeks to unravel the neglected problem of continuity. Applications include the nature and dynamics of slavery and resistance, the construction and diffusion of freedom, globalization and reggae music, the sources and problems of ethnic identity, and the persistence of poverty and gender relations in the Caribbean and America. He is currently completing a book on the meaning and experience of freedom in America.
Robert D. Putnam is Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. He has written a dozen books, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal. He is now studying the challenges of building community in an increasingly diverse society and finishing a new book on the changing role of religion in American communities. He has worked with national leaders, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Bertie Ahern, and Moammar Gadhafi, on issues of civic renewal.
Franklin D. Raines is a founder and Vice Chairman of the Board of Revolution Health Group LLC. He is the retired Chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae, the largest non-bank financial services company in the world. Mr. Raines served in the Cabinet of President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 1998 as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, during which time he led negotiations with Congress that resulted in the first balanced federal budget in thirty years. Raines served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter as Assistant Director of the White House Domestic Council and Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1977 to 1979. He served as a White House Intern on the staff of Pat Moynihan and the Urban Affairs Council in 1969.
Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. For the last 12 years he has served as Scientific Director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), which has been the source for much of his research on neighborhood effects, crime, inequality, and the social structure of the contemporary city. He is the author of many journal articles and several books, including The Explanation of Crime: Context, Mechanisms, and Development, How Neighborhoods Matter, The Social Ecology of Crime, and the award-winning Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life, and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70.
M. Belinda Tucker is a social psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, based in the Center for Culture and Health at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She is also a Faculty Associate of the Bunche Center for African American Studies. She has participated in the direction of a number of landmark studies, including the National Survey of Black Americans in 1979 and a national survey of the residents of Jamaica that examined psychosocial risks for HIV infection and AIDS. She directed (with Claudia Mitchell-Kernan) a 21-city U.S.-based national survey that examined the social context and social and psychological correlates of family formation behaviors and attitudes. Tucker currently directs the Family Research Consortium IV, a national collaborative network of scholars interested in family mental health.
Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has research interests in the sociology of crime and punishment, social stratification, and political sociology. His recent book, Punishment and Inequality in America, examines the impact of the growth of the penal system and its effects on economic inequality and US race relations.
James Q. Wilson has been the Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard and the Collins Professor of Management at UCLA. He now teaches at Pepperdine University. He is the author or coauthor of fifteen books about politics, crime, marriage, and morality. In 2003 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. A MacArthur Prize Fellow, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, and was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.
Karl Zinsmeister is Domestic Policy Adviser to President George W. Bush and Director of the Domestic Policy Council, which coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House. He was formerly editor in chief of The American Enterprise, J. B. Fuqua Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and served as an assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He is the author of Boots on the Ground and Dawn Over Baghdad and other books.