Photo Credit: Stephen P. Hudner Attribution

Dalton Conley is currently University Professor and Dean for the Social Sciences. He is also Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He also serves as a Senior Advisor to the UN Millennium Project.

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 recently finished a M.S. in biology and is currently pursuing a second Ph.D. in biology, studying socially-regulated genes and transgenerational phenotypic plasticity.

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 directing NYU’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research between 2000 and 2006, he served as chair of NYU’s Sociology Department (2006-09). In addition to his appointments at NYU, he has been a Visiting Associate Professor of Sociology at both Yale and Princeton.

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 and edited three. 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 son of a struggling artist and aspiring writer, Conley’s own experience as a white kid growing up in an impoverished community of color is portrayed in Honky as a sort of “natural experiment” that elucidates the more subtle—yet powerful—aspects of race and class privilege through comparison of his experiences with those of his less advantaged neighbors. 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).

Conley is also the editor of Wealth and Poverty in America: A Reader (2002, Boston, MA: Blackwell); After the Bell: Family Background and Educational Success (2003, with Karen Albright; New York: Routledge), and Social Class: How Does it Work? (2008, with Annette Lareau; New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press).

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 11 year old girl) and Yo (a 10 year old boy) and his wife, the artist and engineer, Natalie Jeremijenko.