Kathleen Mullan Harris (born October 13, 1950) is a distinguished professor of sociology from the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center.

Education and career

She received a bachelor's degree in computer science at Pennsylvania State University in 1972. Then, she went on to receive a masters of arts and a doctorate in demography from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 1979 and 1988 respectively. Through her career as a sociologist, she specialized in research on social inequality based on family, poverty, and health. One important highlight upon her research include the 1996 Welfare Reform Act to support the low-income workforce population. Harris became the director and principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) where she led a team to follow the lives of 20,000 teens till adulthood to determine correlations between social inequality and health. Due to her work offering a greater insight on the effects of nature and nurture on the social development of teenagers using the life course perspective, Harris was elected to become a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

Awards and honors

Harris was awarded the Clifford C. Clogg award for early career achievement in population studies and demography from the

Population Association of America The Population Association of America (PAA) is a non-profit scientific professional association dedicated to the study of issues related to population and demography. The PAA was established by Henry Pratt Fairchild and Frederick Osborn, with fu ...

and Research Institute of Pennsylvania State University in 2004. Harris later became the elected president of the Population Association of America in 2008. Afterwards, Harris received the Warren E. Miller award for meritorious service to the social sciences, which she was recognized for her work's impact to the field of social science in 2013. Shortly after, Harris was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. Harris received the Golden Goose award from the US Congress in 2016. She was an American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow of 2019.

References

External links

Faculty profile
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Harris, Kathleen 1950 births Living people University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty Pennsylvania State University alumni American sociologists American women sociologists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences American women social scientists American demographers 21st-century American women