About

Robert J. Sampson is the Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard University. He also holds the position of Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation and is the founding director of the Boston Area Research Initiative. Additionally, he serves as the Scientific Director of the ongoing Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+). Prior to his current roles, Professor Sampson taught at the University of Chicago. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of several prestigious organizations including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Society of Criminology, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the British Academy as a Corresponding Fellow. He is also a former President of the American Society of Criminology and was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2011. Professor Sampson's research and teaching encompass a broad range of topics such as crime and criminal justice, the life course and social change, neighborhood effects, collective civic engagement, inequality, and urban social structure. He has authored numerous articles and multiple award-winning books, including the second edition of "Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect," published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. His most recent book, "Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans," was published in February 2026 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Criminology
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Mathematical analysis
• Genetics
• Social psychology
• Biology
• Developmental psychology
• Economics
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Replication Code for: The Great Leveler? Juvenile Arrest, College Attainment, and the Future of American Inequality

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-01-16

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  This dataset contains the code used to generate figures and tables for: Garrett Baker, David S. Kirk, and Robert J. Sampson, "The Great Leveler? Juvenile Arrest, College Attainment, and the Future of American Inequality," Sociology of Education 99, no. 1 (2026), https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407251338844. For questions on the code, please contact Garrett Baker at garrett.baker@duke.edu or Amelia O'Halloran at ameliaohalloran@fas.harvard.edu. The data used for this analysis contains confidential arrest records and personally identifiable information that can potentially be used to identify study participants, so the underlying data files are not shared in this replication repository. The code is intended to address any questions of methods and variables used. For more information on the PHDCN+ data or to request access, see https://sites.harvard.edu/phdcn/.

  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 3 Measuring What Matters and When

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2026-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 2 Becoming Criminal

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2026-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 7 Guns, Violence, and Poisoned Development

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2026-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• CHAPTER 5 Race, Class, and Grit Meet the Mark of Time

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2026-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Great Leveler? Juvenile Arrest, College Attainment, and the Future of American Inequality

  Sociology of Education · 2025-06-18 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  A burgeoning literature suggests that criminal justice contact in adolescence hinders educational attainment, but prior research primarily considers short-term outcomes and relies on self-reported arrest information. In this article, we leverage Illinois administrative records over 25 years linked to a multicohort longitudinal study to provide estimates of whether an officially recorded juvenile arrest lingers beyond high school through college completion. We find that juvenile arrest is associated with a 20 to 30 percentage-point decrease in one’s likelihood of graduating from a four-year college. This association persists for college enrollees and is consistent across sociodemographic groups and birth cohorts. Given the unequal and prevalent nature of juvenile arrest, the association’s durability across time periods characterized by vast social-structural changes, and the potentially unique vulnerabilities of system-involved students on college campuses, our study offers new insights on how official legal entanglement prior to adulthood may contribute to inequality in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a Safer World by 2040

  JAMA · 2025-11-03 · 10 citations

  articleOpen access

  Importance: Since the start of the 21st century, more than 800 000 firearm deaths and more than 2 million firearm injuries have occurred in the US. All categories of firearm violence-homicide, suicide, unintentional-result in reverberating harms to individuals, families, communities, and society. The collective responsibility of society is to safeguard the health and safety of its members, including from firearm harms. The JAMA Summit on Firearm Violence convened 60 thought leaders from a wide array of disciplines to chart an innovations roadmap that will lead to substantial reductions in firearm harms by 2040. Observations: The vision for 2040 is a country where firearm violence is substantially reduced and where all people and communities report feeling safe from firearm harms. The vision centers on practical solutions with an understanding of the country's constitutional protections for firearm ownership. Achieving the 2040 vision will require expansion of proven evidence-based strategies and the development of new, innovative approaches rooted in equity, accountability, and collective responsibility. Discussions centered on projecting a safer world, community violence interventions, technologic innovations, federal and state-level oversight of firearms, ethical considerations, and primordial prevention of firearm violence. The Summit charted a roadmap of 5 essential actions in the next 5 years to achieve this vision: (1) focus on communities and change fundamental structures that lead to firearm harms, (2) harness technological strengths responsibly, (3) change the narrative around firearm harms, (4) take a whole-government and whole-society approach, and (5) spark a research revolution on preventing firearm harms. Conclusions and Relevance: A safer world will require investing in the discovery, implementation, and scaling of solutions that reduce firearm harms and center on the people and communities most affected by firearm violence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Foreword

  Race and Justice · 2025-11-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disentangling Gun Ownership and Leanings to Political Violence in Unstable Times

  JAMA Network Open · 2024-04-09 · 2 citations

  letterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Garen J. Wintemute, MD, MPH; Andrew Crawford, PhD; Sonia L. Robinson, PhD, MPH; Elizabeth A. Tomsich, PhD; Paul M. Reeping, PhD, MS; Julia P. Schleimer, MPH; Veronica A. Pear, PhD, MPH, MA

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The social foundations of racial inequalities in arrest over the life course and in changing times

  CrimRxiv · 2024-07-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Although racial disparities in criminal justice contact are long-standing and the subject of continuing public debate, few studies have linked early-life social conditions to racial disparities in arrest over the life course and in changing times. In this article, we advance and test a theoretical model of racial inequality in long-term arrest histories on a representative sample of nearly 1,000 individuals from multiple birth cohorts in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Large Black–White disparities in arrests from ages 10 to 40 arise from racial inequalities in exposure to cumulative childhood advantages and disadvantages rather than from race-specific effects. Smaller but meaningful Hispanic–White gaps follow a similar pattern, and the same explanations of racial disparities hold across different offense types and across birth cohorts who came of age at different times during 1995 to 2021. These findings indicate that inequalities in early-life structural factors, which themselves are historically shaped, trigger processes of cumulative advantage and disadvantage that produce racial disparities in arrests over the life course and that persist across different points in contemporary history.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant P01AG031093

  NIH · $21.6M · 2014

• RIDIR: Collaborative Research: Portal to Data and Analysis Tools (P->DAT): Enabling Data-Intensive Research in the Urban Sciences on Linked, Large-Scale Records

  NSF · $530k · 2016–2019

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Skill-Based Sorting into Neighborhoods and Schools

  NSF · $16k · 2019–2020

• Catalyzing a Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-University Urban Research Agenda in the Age of Digital Data

  NSF · $495k · 2013–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen W. Raudenbush

  University of Chicago

  387 shared

• Felton J. Earls

  365 shared

• Jeanne Brooks‐Gunn

  Columbia University

  337 shared

• John H. Laub

  78 shared

• Daniel S. Nagin

  Carnegie Mellon University

  32 shared

• Jeffrey D. Morenoff

  19 shared

• T. E. Moffitt

  15 shared

• Jeanne Brooks‐Gunn

  14 shared

Labs

• PHDCNPI

Education

• Ph.D., Sociology

  Harvard University

  1990

• Other, Sociology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1985

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the American Philosophical Society
• Fellow of the American Society of Criminology
• Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Scien…
• John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow