Faculty

Jennie Brand

Prof. Brand teaches Quantitative Data Analysis and co-teaches Social Stratification, Mobility, and Inequality with Prof. Mare. She studies social inequality and its implications for various outcomes that indicate life chances. Prof. Brand is principally interested in the life trajectories of socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. Her research agenda encompasses three main areas: (1) access to and the impact of higher education; (2) the socioeconomic and social-psychological consequences of job displacement; and (3) causal inference and the application and innovation of quantitative methods for panel data. Prof. Brand is also the Associate Director at the California Center for Population Research.

Cameron Cambell

E-Mail: camcam@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Campbell teaches Intermediate Statistical Methods II, Social Demography, and Historical Demography. His research focuses on the relationships between kinship, inequality, and demographic behavior. He has published extensively on family, population, and stratification in eighteenth and nineteenth century northeast China, most notably the book Fate and Fortune in Rural China with James Lee.

Patric Heuveline

E-Mail: heuveline@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Heuveline teaches Introduction to Demographic Methods and Social Demography. His research interests are children and the family, Cambodia, and formal Demography.

Ka-Yuet Liu

E-mail: ka@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Liu teaches Intermediate Statistical Methods II. Her research examines local mechanisms that generate social and spatial patterns in macro outcomes. By focusing on the social networks in which people and institutions are embedded, her findings demonstrate how large-scale phenomena – from the distribution of suicides at the workplace to the rising prevalence of autism – arise from the interactions among the individuals involved. Mechanisms of information diffusion and the spatial and temporal dimensions of social dynamics are central to her research.

Robert Mare

E-Mail: mare@ucla.edu

Prof. Mare teaches Event History Analysis and co-teaches Social Stratification, Mobility, and Inequality with Prof. Brand. His work focuses 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.

Gabriel Rossman

E-Mail: rossman@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Rossman teaches Intermediate Statistical Methods I and Cultural Sociology. At a substantive level his research addresses culture and mass media, especially pop music radio and Hollywood films. At a theoretical and methodological level he is most interested in understanding diffusion processes, particularly through approaches that aggregate information across many innovations rather than treating them one at a time.

Judith Seltzer

E-Mail: seltzerj@ucla.edu

Prof. Seltzer teaches Social Demography and Intergenerational Relationships. Her research examines inequality with and between families. She is especially interested in kinship institutions that are in flux, such as marriage and cohabitation in the contemporary United States or divorced and nonmarital families, in which family membership and co-residence do not coincide. With her collaborators, she also explores ways to improve the quality of survey data on families.

Megan Sweeney

E-Mail: msweeney@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Sweeney teaches Intermediate Statistical Methods III. Her research interests are family, demography, and social stratification. Prof. Sweeney is also the Vice Chair and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology.

Edward T Walker

E-mail: walker@soc.ucla.edu

Prof. Walker teaches Organizational Theory. His research interests center on questions of how civil society is shaped by (and shapes) the marketplace and the state, and he has a particular interest in how social movements influence a variety of societal institutions. To that end, his research has investigated the means by which corporations intervene in public life through mobilizing grassroots campaigns and partnering with nonprofit organizations, how business contexts structure the tactical choices of protest groups, and the relationship between fully professionalized (or “non-membership”) advocacy organizations and traditional membership organizations. He has also studied community-based organizations’ efforts to build power for underrepresented citizens, create new economic opportunities, and make local governments more accountable. More recently, he has become interested in community-level isomorphic pressures in the philanthropic giving of firms, particularly in health-related industries. He is also currently co-editing the volume Democratizing Inequalities on the challenges inherent in promoting civic participation and empowered governance in a context of heightened inequalities.

Affiliated Faculty

Anne Pebley

E-mail: pebley@ucla.edu

Prof. Pebley’s research has focused on fertility and marriage patterns, children’s health and welfare, and family organization in the United States and in other countries. She has collaborated with researchers and institutions in Central America, West, Central, and East Africa, and Bangladesh and India. Currently most of her research is based on the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS) which she co-directs with Narayan Sastry (University of Michigan).

Meredith Phillips

E-mail: phillips@sppsr.ucla.edu

Prof. Phillips teaches Statistical Methods for Policy Analysis I and Research Design and Methods for Social Policy. She studies the causes and consequences of educational inequality. Her research focuses in particular on the causes of ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in educational success and how to reduce those disparities. Her current projects include a qualitative implementation study of the infusion of academic assistance into traditional afterschool programs; a random-assignment study of the efficacy of a relatively low-cost college access intervention; an ethnographic longitudinal study of adolescent culture, families, schools, and academic achievement; and a quantitative study of the role of parenting practices in generating early childhood achievement disparities.

Emeriti

Richard Berk

E-mail: berk@stat.ucla.edu

Prof. Berk’s research interests are program evaluation, environmental research, criminal justice, and statistical methods. His current research is on statistical methods for evaluating computer simulation models, data mining techniques and especially ensemble methods.

William M Mason

E-mail: masonwm@ucla.edu

Prof. Mason’s research interests are social demography and quantitative methodology. His current research is on infant and child mortality in China and methodology of multilevel analysis.

Donald J Treiman

E-mail: treimandj@gmail.com

Prof. Treiman’s research interests are social stratification and social demography. His current research includes internal migration in China, cross-national comparative studies of social stratification and mobility, and social inequality in China, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe.