Mary Waters
MARY C. WATERS is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University where she has taught since 1986. She was chair of the department for eight years. She is a member of the Harvard Population Center, where she serves on the Executive Committee.
Her work has focused on the integration of immigrants and their children, racial and ethnic disparities in mortality and morbidity, the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity, the transition to adulthood, and the long run consequences of natural disasters.
Recently Waters was the chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. This report, the result of two years of work by an interdisciplinary panel of experts, was released in 2016 and was featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and on NPR and many other media outlets. Waters and some of the other 18 panelists briefed the US Senate, House of Representatives, the White House, and various state and local governments on the findings. It was published as a book by the National Academies Press.
She is also co-directing, with Jean Rhodes of University of Massachusetts Boston, the RISK Project, a longitudinal study of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. This study, funded by NIH, NSF, and the MacArthur and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, includes pre-hurricane data on physical and mental health and follows survivors wherever they have relocated, currently to 31 states. The study focused on the long term effects of the hurricane trauma and relocation on mental and physical health outcomes for survivors and their children.
Waters is the author, co-author, or editor of 13 books. Her study of the children of immigrants, Inheriting the City: The Second Generation Comes of Age (Harvard University and Russell Sage Press, 2008), won the 2010 American Sociological Association Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the ASA. Her 1999 book Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Harvard University Press) won five scholarly awards, including the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race and Urban Politics of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book Award of the Center for the Study of Inequality of Cornell University. Other books include The Art and Science of Social Research (W.W.Norton, 2018), Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011) and The Next Generation: The Children of Immigrants in Europe and North America (New York University Press, 2010); The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2007), Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004), Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective (Blackwell Press, 2004), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990), and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1988). She is also the author of over 80 articles and chapters on racial and ethnic identity, immigrant assimilation, and natural disaster recovery.
Waters’ work has been supported by the Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, W.T. Grant, MacArthur, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, as well as by the Foundation for Child Development, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was elected to membership in the Sociological Research Association in 1993. In 2003-2004, she was named a Walter Channing Cabot Faculty Fellow for “eminence in history, literature or art." In 2005, she was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society; in 2006, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and in 2010, to the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently the chair of the Social and Political Sciences Section of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2016 she was awarded the ASA International Migration Section Distinguished Career Award for Career Contributions to the study of International Migration.
Waters has testified twice before Congress on how the census should measure racial and ethnic identity. She served on the Advisory Board to the U.S. Census as a representative of the Population Association of America from 1999-2005. She has also consulted extensively to the Census Bureau, and she was a Census Scholar in residence at the Bureau in 2011. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, serving as its chair for two of her ten years term. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America, and she was a member of the International Migration Committee, and the Research on Katrina Advisory Committee of the Social Science Research Council. She was a member of the MacArthur Network on the Transition to Adulthood and she has held numerous elected offices and served on committees of the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America and the Eastern Sociological Society.
She is currently a member of the Final Selection Committee of the Guggenheim Foundation, the study section of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NIH), and the International Migration Committee of the Russell Sage Foundation.
At Harvard, Waters has served as an elected member of the Faculty Council, and as a member of the Human Subjects Committee (IRB), the Committee on Research Policy, the Committees on Ethnic Studies, Social Studies, Social Policy, Women’s Studies, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education, Public Service, Freshman Seminars, Athletics, Rights and Responsibilities, the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center on Latin America, the Native American Program, and the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press. She was a member of the Task Force on General Education that redesigned Harvard's general education program in 2007 and a member of the Committee on the Implementation of the new General Education program in 2016-2017. From 2003 to 2016 she was a member of the Executive Committee and Core Faculty in the Robert Wood Johnson Postdoc Program in Health Care Policy. She is faculty advisor to numerous student groups and has run a Graduate Workshop on International Migration for the past twenty years. This workshop attracts students and faculty from Harvard’s many graduate and professional schools and the surrounding academic community to share ongoing research in the area of international migration.
Waters co-directed the Harvard Manchester Summer Workshop on Social Change and Immigration for graduate students from the United States and Europe from2007 to 2011. During 2007-2008, she was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester.
Waters grew up in Brooklyn, NY and received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981) and an M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley.
Mary Waters
MARY C. WATERS is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, where she has taught since 1986. In 2018 she was also appointed the PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, which is the “highest honor conferred by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, recognizing excellence in leadership, teaching and scholarly achievement”. She has held various leadership roles at Harvard, including chairing the Sociology department for over eight years, serving on the executive committees of the Harvard Population Center, the Standing Committee of the PhD in Population Health Sciences, the Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Program in Health Care Policy, the FAS Committee on Research Policy, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. She will be the Director of the Harvard Population Center in 2020-2021.
A demographer and sociologist, Mary’s work has focused on the integration of immigrants and their children, racial, class and ethnic disparities in mortality and morbidity, the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity, the transition to adulthood, and the long run consequences of natural disasters. She has served as a consultant on population dynamics and projections, survey research design and analysis, and research portfolios for nonprofits, businesses, foundations, universities and government.
Waters was the chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on The Integration of Immigrants into American Society. This report, the result of two years of work by an interdisciplinary panel of experts, was released in 2016 and was featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and on NPR and many other media outlets. Waters and some of the other 18 panelists briefed the US Senate, House of Representatives, the White House, and various state and local governments on the findings. It was published as a book by the National Academies Press.
She co-directs the RISK Project, a longitudinal study of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. This study, funded by NIH, NSF, and the MacArthur and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, includes pre-hurricane data on physical and mental health and follows survivors wherever they have relocated, currently to 31 states. The study focused on the long term effects of the hurricane trauma and relocation on mental and physical health outcomes for survivors and their children.
Waters is the author, co-author, or editor of 13 books. Her study of the children of immigrants, Inheriting the City: The Second Generation Comes of Age (Harvard University and Russell Sage Press, 2008), won the 2010 American Sociological Association Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the ASA. Her 1999 book Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Harvard University Press) won five scholarly awards, including the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race and Urban Politics of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book Award of the Center for the Study of Inequality of Cornell University. Other books include The Art and Science of Social Research (W.W.Norton, 2018), Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011) and The Next Generation: The Children of Immigrants in Europe and North America (New York University Press, 2010); The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2007), Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004), Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective (Blackwell Press, 2004), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990), and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1988). She is also the author of over 90 articles and chapters on racial and ethnic identity, immigrant assimilation, and natural disaster recovery.
Waters’ work has been supported by the Russell Sage, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, W.T. Grant, MacArthur, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations, as well as by the Foundation for Child Development, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was elected to membership in the Sociological Research Association in 1993. In 2003-2004, she was named a Walter Channing Cabot Faculty Fellow for “eminence in history, literature or art." In 2005, she was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society; in 2006, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and in 2010, to the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently the chair of the Social and Political Sciences Section of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2016 she was awarded the ASA International Migration Section Distinguished Career Award for Career Contributions to the study of International Migration.
Waters has testified twice before Congress on how the census should measure racial and ethnic identity. She served on the Advisory Board to the U.S. Census as a representative of the Population Association of America from 1999-2005. She has also consulted extensively to the Census Bureau, and she was a Census Scholar in residence at the Bureau in 2011. She was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, serving as its chair for two of her ten years term. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, the Board of Directors of the Population Association of America, and she was a member of the International Migration Committee, and the Research on Katrina Advisory Committee of the Social Science Research Council. She was a member of the MacArthur Network on the Transition to Adulthood and she has held numerous elected offices and served on committees of the American Sociological Association, the Population Association of America and the Eastern Sociological Society.
She is currently a member of the Final Selection Committee of the Guggenheim Foundation, the study section of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NIH), and the International Migration Committee of the Russell Sage Foundation. She is an associate editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.
At Harvard, Waters has served as an elected member of the Faculty Council, and as a member of the Human Subjects Committee (IRB), the Committee on Research Policy, the Committees on Ethnic Studies, Social Studies, Social Policy, Women’s Studies, Undergraduate Education, Graduate Education, Public Service, Freshman Seminars, Athletics, Rights and Responsibilities, the Policy Committee of the David Rockefeller Center on Latin America, the Native American Program, and the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press. She was a member of the Task Force on General Education that redesigned Harvard's general education program in 2007 and a member of the Committee on the Implementation of the new General Education program in 2016-2017. From 2003 to 2016 she was a member of the Executive Committee and Core Faculty in the Robert Wood Johnson Postdoc Program in Health Care Policy. A prize-winning teacher, she is faculty advisor to numerous student groups and has run a Graduate Workshop on International Migration for the past twenty years. This workshop attracts students and faculty from Harvard’s many graduate and professional schools and the surrounding academic community to share ongoing research in the area of international migration.
Waters co-directed the Harvard Manchester Summer Workshop on Social Change and Immigration for graduate students from the United States and Europe from 2007 to 2011. During 2007-2008, she was the Hallsworth Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester.
Waters grew up in Brooklyn, NY and received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981) and an M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. in Sociology (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley.