Principal Investigator
Claude Fischer
University of California, Berkeley. Fischer arrived at Berkeley in 1972 with degrees from UCLA and Harvard. Most of his early research focused on the social psychology of urban life— how and why rural and urban experiences differ—and on social networks, both interests coming together in three early books: The Urban Experience (1976, 1984); Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting (1977), To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (1982) and Still Connected: Social Networks in America Since 1970 (2011). He lives in Berkeley with his wife, Ann Swidler, also a Professor of Sociology at U.C. Berkeley. Fischer blogs at Made in America.
Director
Leora Lawton
Leora Lawton is the Director of UCNets and the Executive Director Emerita of the Berkeley Population Center. A social demographer, Lawton earned a BA in economics from UC Berkeley, an MA in demography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a PhD in sociology from Brown. Her earlier academic work focused on intergenerational relations as a function of parental divorce. Later she spent many years in the private sector as a survey research methodologist before returning to academia in 2006. Current research interests are about pets as filling the role of children in post-demographic transition households, and the effects of religious affiliation and also family structure on networks of support.
Faculty
Shira Offer is Professor of Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, who joined the project while a visiting professor at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2006 and worked as a Research Analyst at the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work. Her main research interests include personal networks and support, work and family, gender relations, social inequality and poverty. Her research is motivated by the concern of how the current social, cultural, and economic climate affects intergenerational relations and the well-being and functioning of families of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. She has published articles in such journals as the American Sociological Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Forces, Social Science Research, Sociological Quarterly, Community, Work, and Family, Racial and Ethnic Studies, and Gender & Society. For more information and downloads visit https://biu.academia.edu/
Tara McKay is a Sociologist and Assistant Professor in the Center for Medicine, Health & Society at Vanderbilt University. She began working with the UCNets study during her time at UC Berkeley as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Scholar (2013-2015) and led an oversample of older LGBT adults for the UCNets study. She is the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt LGBT Policy Lab and is Principal Investigator of the Vanderbilt University Social Networks, Aging, and Policy Study (VUSNAPS) funded by the National Institute on Aging (R01). She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013. Her primary research interests are in LGBT health and policy in the US and Africa.
Stacy Torres is Assistant Professor at the University of California San Francisco. She earned her PhD in sociology from New York University in 2015 and holds a BA in comparative literature from Fordham University and MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Columbia University. Her dissertation, an urban ethnography of older adults living in a gentrified New York City neighborhood, is under contract with the University of California Press. Her research and teaching interests include gender, health, the family, urban communities, aging and the life course, and qualitative research methods. She held an RWJ postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, and then was an assistant professor at the University at Albany, State University of New York before returning to California.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Graduate Students
Xavier Durham is a 6th year Sociology graduate student.
Emily Ruppel is a 6th year Sociology graduate student. She is providing her statistical expertise in fixed effects modeling.
Chris Soria is a 2nd year Demography graduate student. H is working with Claude Fischer to develop codings for open-ended and using newly acquired AI skills to do so.