Director

David L. Featherman

Director, Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society;
Research Professor, Population Studies Center;
Professor of Psychology;
Professor of Sociology

Phone: 734-647-5198
Email: feathrmn@isr.umich.edu
U of M Directory Listing
Curriculum Vitae (PDF 139K)

Professor Featherman is founding director of the Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society (CARSS), a novel advanced study center created in 2003 at the University of Michigan to pursue team-led analyses of social issues and intellectual dilemmas on a world scale.

He holds simultaneous appointments as Professor of Sociology and Psychology in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, and as Research Professor in the Population Studies Center of the Institute for Social Research (ISR). Between 1995 and 2005 he served as director of ISR. An alumnus of Michigan (1969 Ph.D. in Social Psychology; Masters in Sociology), Featherman was President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York City before returning to Ann Arbor in 1995. The SSRC was founded in 1923 by private philanthropy to function as a national academy of social science. He previously held the John Bascom Professorship in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he served on its faculty and in various administrative positions from 1970 to 1989.

His research has spanned the multi-disciplinary fields of demography, social psychology, human development, and gerontology. He has written or co-authored six books and dozens of published papers about socioeconomic inequality and social mobility in Western industrial nations, and between 1981-1987 he chaired the SSRC Committee on Comparative Stratification Research. Since the late 1980's, Featherman's publications on the sociology of the life course, aging, and life-span human development include five volumes of a co-edited series, Life-Span Development and Behavior. His contributions to the latter field were acknowledged in 1990 with the Distinguished Career of Research award of the American Sociological Association, Section on Aging and the Life Course. His most recent book, co-edited with Maris Vinovskis, Social Science and Policymaking: A Search for Relevance in the Twentieth Century, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2001.

Professor Featherman is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 1978-79 Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto), a former Guggenheim Fellow, and Past-President of the Sociological Research Association. He serves on various national and international advisory boards and boards of trustees.