Career
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 1997-98 and 2002-03 academic years he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.
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.
Sampson published his first book in 1993, co-authored with John Laub, entitled Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life, which received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology. 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 2011, he and fellow sociologist John Laub received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for their achievements in the field of criminology.
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.
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