Kathleen Mullan Harris
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Primary Section: 53, Social and Political Sciences Secondary Section: 54, Economic Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2014)
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Biosketch
Kathleen Mullan Harris, PhD, is the James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, and Faculty Fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on social inequality and health with particular interests in family demography, the transition to adulthood, health disparities and family formation. Dr. Harris is Director and Principal Investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a longitudinal study of more than 20,000 teens who are being followed into adulthood. Under her leadership, the study has pioneered innovative study designs and integrative multidisciplinary research to understand social, environmental, behavioral, biological and genetic linkages in developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into adulthood. She has been an advocate within the social science and population disciplines for bridging social and biomedical sciences to advance knowledge on the development of health disparities from both an inter- and intra-generational perspective to inform public health and social policy. Her publications appear in a wide range of disciplinary journals including demography, genetics, family, epidemiology, biology, public policy, survey methodology, medicine, and social and health behavior. Dr. Harris serves on several national advisory boards of leading NIH studies as well as on the National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations of the Census Bureau. She received her doctorate in demography from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Harris was awarded the Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America in 2004 and the Warren E. Miller Award for Meritorious Service to the Social Sciences from ICPSR in 2013. She was President of the Population Association of America in 2009 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. She received her PhD in demography from the University of Pennsylvania.
Research Interests
My research interests are centered on social inequality, specializing in the substantive areas of family, poverty, and health. In the early part of my career, I studied the inter-relationships among family, poverty, and social policy, including such topics as teenage parenthood, nonmartial childbearing, single-mother families, absent fathers, outcomes for poor children, and the causes and consequences of welfare dependency. My research informed the development of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law that included support for work among the low-income population. When I became PI and Director of Add Health, a longitudinal study of over 20,000 teens being followed into adulthood, my research focused on health disparities among immigrant, single-mother, minority, and poor families. In my efforts to map social stratification pathways that lead to health disparities, I pioneered an integrative multidisciplinary design and research program to understand social, environmental, behavioral, biological and genetic linkages in developmental and health trajectories across the life course. I have argued forcefully for studying health among the young to identify markers of health risk before disease is manifest to save social, emotional, and financial costs to individuals, families, and society. My publications appear in multiple disciplinary journals in demography, genetics, family, sociology, epidemiology, biology, public policy, survey methodology, medicine, and social and health behavior.
