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Past Directors and Administrators

Dalton Conley

Dalton Conley (http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dc66/) is Dean of Social Sciences and University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University.  He holds appointments in NYU's Sociology Department and Wagner School of Public Service, as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist (and second social scientist) to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation for best young researcher in any field of science, math or engineering. The annual award comes with a half-million dollars of research support. Conley's research focuses on how socio-economic status is transmitted across generations and on the public policies that affect that process. In this vein, has studied sibling differences in socioeconomic success; racial inequalities; the measurement of class and social status; and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position.

Conley received his undergraduate degree in the Humanities from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990, a Master Degree in Public Administration from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Sociology (with distinction) from Columbia University in 1996. He pursued post-doctoral training as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (and San Francisco) from 1996-98. From 1998 to 2000, Conley was Assistant Professor of Sociology and African and African American studies at Yale University. He first joined the faculty of NYU in January 2000 as an Associate Professor of Sociology. In addition to his appointment at NYU, he has been a Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology at both Yale and Princeton. He is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in biology (with an emphasis on developmental genetics); he recently received the M.S. in route to the Ph.D.

Conley has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation; a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award; an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations; a German Marshall Fund Fellow and had been selected as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. Conley has been elected to permanent membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and as a Young Leader by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He also has been named one of nine "innovative minds" by SEED Magazine.

Conley has written six books: his first book, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America (1999; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), was based on his doctoral thesis (which received the award for best in the field from the American Sociological Association) and explored the causes and consequences of the wealth gap between blacks and whites in the U.S., arguing that this equity inequity serves as the engine for continued racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights era.

He is also the author of Honky, a "sociological memoir" (2000, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 2001, New York: Vintage). The Washington Post called Honky "lucid", and the San Francisco Chronicle claimed that it gave readers "a rare opportunity for insight into the complexities of race in America."

In 2003, Conley, along with Kate Strully and Neil Bennett co-authored The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). This work showed the importance of perinatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes, reversing the typical way sociologists viewed the health-economics relationship and anticipated a robust research literature on early life health conditions as they affect later socioeconomic processes and outcomes.

His next book was The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why (2004, New York: Pantheon). This study showed the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success, thereby challenging the usual association of intra-household differences with the greater salience of achievement and/or meritocracy. The New York Times called The Pecking Order "astonishing", and the Washington Post selected it as "one of the year's most distinguished books. His latest books include You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist (2008, New York: W.W. Norton) and Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners and the Age of Affluence to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms and Economic Anxiety (2009, New York: Pantheon).

In addition to writing books, he is a frequent contributor to mainstream media outlets including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, Fortune and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He also lectures frequently and makes media appearances on such venues as Today, The O'Reilly Factor, The NewsHour, Fresh Air, and 20/20. He currently resides in New York City where he serves on Manhattan's Community Board 2. He lives with his two children, E (an eleven year old girl) and Yo (an nine year old boy) and his wife, the artist and engineer, Natalie Jeremijenko.