Robert J. Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he was appointed in 2003. Before that he taught for twelve years in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago and for seven years at the University of IlliNois at Urbana-Champaign. Sampson was a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation from 1994-2002, and in the 1997-98 and 2002-03 academic years he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California. In 2005, he received a three-year RWJ Investigator Award in Health Policy Research and was inducted as a Fellow into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Professor Sampson's research interests center on crime and violence, the life course, neighborhood effects, and the sociology of the modern city. In the area of neighborhood effects and urban sociology his current work is focusing on the community-level context of well being, race/ethnicity and mechanisms of ecological inequality, the social meanings of disorder, the network structure of community influence, civic engagement, and other topics linked to community-level social processes. Much of this work stems from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, for which Sampson serves as Scientific Director. He is also engaged in a longitudinal study from birth to death of 1,000 disadvantaged men born in Boston during the Great Depression era. Two publications from this project Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points Through Life (Harvard, 1993) and Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives: Delinquent Boys to Age 70 (Harvard, 2003), each received distinguished book awards from the American Society of CrimiNology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Crime, Law, and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association.