Robert D. Mare

Professor Robert D. Mare was the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Statistics at UCLA, and an associate member of Nuffield College at Oxford University. His work focused on four areas: (1) dynamic analysis of residential mobility and residential segregation; (2) educational assortative mating and marriage markets; (3) the joint analysis of social mobility, fertility, marriage, and other demographic processes; (4) multigenerational processes and social mobility. His early work focused on the impact of parental resources on children's education. Mare discovered that resources did not affect outcomes in the same way across the schooling career but differed from one schooling transition to another, with resources more important at earlier stages. He conducted innovative studies of youth unemployment, social mobility, differential mortality, assortative mating, and residential mobility and segregation. His most recent research used statistical methods and demographic projection techniques to address one of the oldest sociological problems: the micro-macro linkage.

Mare was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. He was Founding Director of the California Center for Population Research. He was a past president (2010) of the Population Association of America and of the Research Committee on Social Stratification of the International Sociological Association. He received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Memorial Award from the American Sociological Association (1999), and the American Journal of Sociology Roger Gould Prize (2006-07, with E. Bruch). He was the former chair (2004-08) of the Governing Board of the NORC (National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) General Social Survey.