Robert Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also Co-Director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and President-Elect of the Population Association of America. He came to UNC in summer of 2015 after spending 19 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as Director of their NICHD-supported Population Research Center between 2001–05 and Chairperson of their Department of Sociology from 2006–10. In 2010, he was presented with the Clifford Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement by the Population Association of America.
Dr. Hummer’s research focuses on the accurate description and more complete understanding of population health and mortality patterns and trends in the United States. He has been funded by NICHD, NIA, and/or NSF throughout most of his career to date and has published more than 150 journal articles, book chapters, and books in this area. His work has been cited over 12,000 times to date. He is particularly experienced with developing conceptual and analytic models for the understanding of racial/ethnic, immigrant-native, and socioeconomic differences in population health/mortality, as well as with the collection and effective use of very large data sets to study U.S. health/mortality patterns and trends. Dr. Hummer’s most recent book, co-authored with Erin R. Hamilton, is Population Health in America (2019, University of California Press).