Keynote Address: Social, Behavioral, and Biological Linkages across the Life Course

Kathleen Mullan Harris is the James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology. Her research focuses on inter-relationships among family, poverty, and social policy. Harris is Director and Principal Investigator of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a longitudinal study of more than 20 thousand teens who are being followed into young adulthood. With Add Health data, Harris is studying health disparities, the acculturation of immigrant youth, and the family formation behavior of young adults, including non-marital childbearing, cohabitation and marriage. Under Harris' leadership, the next wave of Add Health is expanding its biological data collection to bridge biological and social sciences in the study of developmental and health trajectories from adolescence into young adulthood. Harris was awarded the 2004 Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement from the Population Association of America. She was elected president of the Population Association of America 2008-09.