Weeden

Kim Weeden, professor of sociology, has been named the Robert S. Harrison Director of Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS) for a three-year term. She will replace the current director, Kenneth Roberts, professor of government, in January 2013.

Cornell created the ISS in 2004 to foster interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and to help lure top social scientists to the university. Its flagship activities are three-year theme projects that bring together teams of social scientists with expertise on topics such as poverty and immobility, contentious knowledge and politics, social networks, immigration and decision-making processes. Because many of Cornell's discipline-based departments are small compared with their peers and its social scientists are spread across multiple colleges, Weeden says said that there is a lot of room for cross-department collaboration.

"The main goal of the ISS is to encourage those collaborations, to foster them, to give them the little push that they might need to get going, as opposed to relying on haphazard ways that people might meet each other at Cornell and recognize some of their common intellectual interests," says Weeden said.

Weeden will bring to the position four years of experience on ISS's advisory board. "It made me appreciate the tremendous breadth of top-notch scholarship in the social sciences at Cornell, but also the challenges of coordinating the social sciences across colleges with diverse missions," Weeden said. "The ISS plays a key role in advancing the social sciences, intellectually, and extending the national and international reputation of the work we do."

An expert in the area of inequality, Weeden's research projects have focused on sources of rising income inequality; the relationship between social class position and lifestyles, social and political attitudes, and economic outcomes; gender inequality in labor markets; and gender in science.

As an ISS faculty fellow this fall, she'll have a semester-long break from teaching before taking up her duties as director. During this semester, she'll write up results of a National Science Foundation (NSF) -funded project, with Steve Morgan, the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor in the Social Sciences, which assesses how young men and women's plans to enter science careers evolve throughout the high school and college years; they'll extend this research to look at social class differences in the evolution of occupational plans. She'll also finish up a project on rising income inequality.

Weeden earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1999. She was assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago until 2001, when she was recruited to Cornell. She chaired the Department of Sociology from 2007 to 2010, and has served on the Social Sciences Internal Advisory Council and the faculty advisory board for the Survey Research Institute. Since 2008, she has been a co-director of the CU-ADVANCE Center, an NSF-funded program to improve the recruitment, retention, and professional development of women faculty in engineering, math and the sciences.