Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson is Chairman of the Department of Sociology and the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He also serves as Senior Advisor in the Social Sciences at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Before coming to Harvard in 2003 he taught for twelve years in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and seven years in his first faculty post at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Other appointments include Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Criminology, Ernest Burgess Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Professor Sampson's research interests include crime, the life course, neighborhood effects, and the social structure of the city. Recent publications have focused on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of concentrated inequality, collective efficacy and crime, immigration, the social meanings and stigma of "disorder," poverty traps, the spatial dynamics of social life, the comparative network structure of community influence, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes. This research stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods(PHDCN), for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director.

Contact Information

William James Hall 470
33 Kirkland Street
Cambridge, MA, 02138

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