Robert Sampson

Robert J. Sampson is the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. His major research interests include criminology, the life course, and urban sociology. Sampson is currently studying the nature, sources, and consequences of community-level social processes (e.g., collective efficacy, network density, organizational participation, and spatial dynamics) as part of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), for which he serves as Scientific Director. He is also engaged in a longitudinal study of crime and deviance over 70 years in the lives of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era. His book with John Laub on this project, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Harvard University Press, 1993), received the outstanding book award from the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association.

In 1994, Sampson was named as Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. In 1997, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. In 1999-2000, Sampson was appointed to serve on the National Research Council's "Committee on Future Research Directions for Behavioral and Social Sciences at the NIH," which issued its report in February, 2001.