Robert J. Sampson is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Education
Sampson received his Bachelor of Arts in sociology from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York in 1977. He then went on to receive a Doctor of Philosophy in sociology from University at Albany, State University of New York in 1983.
Career
From 2005 through 2010, he served as the Chair of the Department of Sociology. In 2011-2012, he was elected as the President of the American Society of Criminology. Before joining Harvard, Sampson taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago for twelve years and before that the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for seven years.
He was a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation from 1994–2002, and in the 1997-1998 and 2002-2003 academic years he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California.
Sampson has published widely in the areas of crime, neighborhood effects, ecometrics, and the social organization of cities. In the area of neighborhood effects and urban studies his work has focused on race/ethnicity and social mechanisms of ecological inequality, immigration and crime, the meanings and implications of "disorder," spatial disadvantage, collective civic engagement, and other topics linked to the general idea of community-level social processes.
Much of this work stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director. The books detailed Sampson"s longitudinal study from birth to death of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era.
A second book from this research, Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70, published in 2003, follows up on the study by integrating personal narratives with the quantitative analysis of life-course trajectories across the seven decades in the lives of the disadvantaged subjects.
The book received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology in 2004. In 2012, he published Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, which details his decade"s worth of research on the city of Chicago.
Membership
National Academy of Sciences.