Emeritus Faculty

Dr. Friedman is doing research on changes in a small Ohio city through the 20th century. She uses diverse records to document residential patterns, and she interviews with people who have known the city at different times. Visuals are important in this work. Other projects focus on suburbanization. She has looking at visual artists' perceptions of suburbia and at patterns of suburbanization in New Jersey. Other research looks at differences among metropolitan areas in their development of or use of various programs or organizations, such as foreign trade zones or fast-growing small firms.

Cathy Greenblat is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Rutgers University where she served for 35 years as a member of the Department of Sociology, Women’s Studies, and the Bloustein School of Planning.  The author of 15 books and more than 100 articles, she has lectured in the USA, Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, Africa, the Philippines, China, Australia, and Japan. Since 2002 she has been engaged in a cross-cultural photographic project on aging, dementia, and end of life care. She served as an Honorary Research Fellow at the International Observatory on End of Life Care, Lancaster University, UK from 2006-2010 and as an Honorary Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland, from 2011-2014. She has a continuing appointment as a Researcher in Human Sciences and Photographie at the Center for Memory Resources and Research (CMRR), University of Nice, France, after serving as an Artist in Residence at the University Hospital Network (CHU) there for 10 years.

Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses on the sociology of medicine and health care, research methods, and statistics. He is interested in medical sociology, social networks, globalization, and the sociology of science.  His current research is about the effects of managed care on adolescents.

Dr. Hansell has research interests in medical sociology, the social psychology of illness behavior, and social support networks. Current projects focus on the effects of managed care on treatment outcomes for mentally ill children and adolescents.

Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in mental health and illness and the sociology of normality and abnormality. His research interests are in the areas of social definitions of mental illness, medicalization, and the impact of social roles on mental health. He is currently working on a book that examines the interplay of cultural and biological factors on conceptions of normality and abnormality.

Allan V. Horwitz earned a doctoral degree in Sociology from Yale University where he was trained in psychiatric epidemiology and in deviance and social control. He came to Rutgers in 1975 as an assistant professor and is currently Board of Governors Professor in the Department of Sociology and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. Professor Horwitz has studied a variety of aspects of mental health and illness, including the social response to mental illness, family caretaking for dependent populations, the impact of social roles and statuses on mental health, and the social construction of mental disorders. His current work integrates biological and sociological perspectives in distinguishing between normal and dysfunctional types of social behaviors. He has published over 100 articles in the main journals in his field. In addition, he has published several books including The Social Control of Mental Illness (Academic Press 1982; new edition Percheron Press 2002); The Logic of Social Control (Plenum Press 1990); Creating Mental Illness (University of Chicago Press 2002); The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Misery into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press 2007); Conundrums of Modern American Medicine (Rutgers University Press 2010); All We Have to Fear: Psychiatry’s Transformation of Normal Anxieties into Mental Disorders (Oxford University Press, 2012); Anxiety: A Short History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and What’s Normal? Reconciling Biology and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016). Between 1980 and 2015 he was the co-director (with David Mechanic) of the NIMH funded Rutgers Postdoctoral Program in Mental Health. He has also served as Chair of the Sociology Department for nine years (1985-1991; 1996-1999), Dean for Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences (2006 – 2011), and Acting Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research (2013 – 2016). Professor Horwitz has also been elected Chair of the Mental Health and Medical Sociology Sections of the American Sociological Association and of the Psychiatric Sociology Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. He has received the Leonard Pearlin Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to the Sociology of Mental Health and the Leo C. Reeder Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contributions to Medical Sociology from the American Sociological Association and the James Greenley Award for Lifetime Achievements in the Sociology of Mental Health from the Psychiatric Sociology Section of the Society for Social Problems. During the 2007-08 academic year he was a Fellow-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and in the 2012-13 year a Fellow-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford University.

Mechanic is the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research and writing deal with social aspects of health and health care.

David Mechanic is the René Dubos University Professor of Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University. His research and writing deal with social aspects of health and health care.

David Mechanic received his Ph.D. from Stanford and joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in 1960, where he was chair of the Department of Sociology (1968-1970), the John Bascom Professor of Sociology (1973-1979) and Director of the Center for Medical Sociology and Health Services Research (1972-1979). He moved to Rutgers University in 1979, was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1980-1984), and established the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research (1985) which he directs. He directs the NIMH Center at Rutgers for Research on the Organization and Financing of Care for the Severely Mentally Ill and serves as the Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's National Health Policy Investigator's Program.

Dr. Mechanic is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. He has served on numerous panels of The National Academy of Sciences, federal agencies and non?profit organizations.

David Mechanic has received many awards including the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Career Award, Health Services Research Prize from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration and the Baxter Allegiance Foundation, the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Association for Health Services Research, the First Carl Taube Award for Distinguished Contributions to Mental Health Services Research from the American Public Health Association, and the Distinguished Medical Sociologist Award and Lifetime Contributions Award in Mental Health from the American Sociological Association. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in The Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

He has written or edited 24 books and approximately 400 research articles, chapters and other publications in medical sociology, health policy, health services research, and the social and behavioral sciences. Among his books are Inescapable Decisions: The Imperatives of Health Reform (1994); Painful Choices: Research and Essays on Heath Care (1989); From Advocacy to Allocation: The Evolving American Health Care System (1986); Mental Health and Social Policy: The Emergence of Managed Care (4th Edition, 1998); and Future Issues in Health Care: Social Policy and the Rationing of Medical Services (1979).

Professor of Sociology, retired effective 7/1/20. Taught courses in sociological writing; research methods; inequalities; addiction. Her current project is on grief and resilience in the midst of the opioid epidemic.

Professor Roos's research interests included work; inequalities; gender and work; stratification; work/family; and addiction. In 1985, she published Gender and Work: A Comparative Analysis of Industrial Societies, and in 1990 she coauthored with Barbara Reskin Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads Into Male Occupations. She authored sole or collaborative articles on a number of topics, among them "Shifting Gender Boundaries: Women's Inroads into Academic Sociology" (with Katharine Jones); "Staffing Personnel: Feminization and Change in Human Resource Management" (with Joan Manley); "Occupational Feminization, Occupational Decline? Sociology's Changing Sex Composition;" "The Gender Gap in Earnings: Trends, Explanations, Prospects" (with Mary Gatta); “Rethinking Occupational Integration” (with Mary Gatta); “Changing Families/Changing Communities: Work, Family, and Community in Transition” (with Mary Trigg and Mary Hartman); “Gender (In)Equity in the Academy: Subtle Mechanisms and the Production of Inequality” (with Mary Gatta); "Interconnecting Work and Family: Race and Class Differences in Women's Work Status and Attitudes;" "Not So Separate Spheres;" and "Integrating Occupations: Changing Occupational Sex Segregation in the U.S. from 2000 to 2014" (with Lindsay Stevens). Prof. Roos is writing a book about grief and resilience in the midst of the opioid epidemic.

Prof. Roos taught courses in work; inequalities; sociological writing; undergraduate and graduate methods; and addiction.

Reflecting her research interests in gender in higher education, from 1999 to 2001 Prof. Roos led the effort within the FAS Deans Office to produce the FAS Gender Equity Report (October, 2001). From 2008 through 2011, she served as Co-PI on the NSF ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant: “RU-FAIR:-Rutgers University for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Re-Imagination.” She also served as Chair of the Sociology Department (1991-1997) and Area Dean for the Social & Behavioral Sciences (1997-2000).

In AY 2018-19, Prof. Roos was a fellow at the Institute for Research on Women's seminar Public Catastrophes, Private Losses, working on a project entitled Public Catastrophe, Private Loss: Grief and Resilience in the Midst of the Opioid Epidemic.

Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the self, gender, mental health, and in writing. In her own research, she is particularly interested in the role of self in mental health and how race/ethnicity, class, and gender shape the self and mental health problems. She is also involved in research on services, stigma, and quality of life of people with chronic mentally illness.

Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Human Ecology, teaches courses in the sociology of economic development, and human ecology. Dr. Rudel's major research interests are in the fields of environmental sociology and economic sociology, especially in Latin America . He has recently published the book, Tropical Forests: Regional Paths of Destruction and Regeneration in the Late Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press).

Dr. Rudel's major research interests are in the fields of environmental sociology and economic sociology, especially in Latin America. He has published articles on land use planning, housing and energy use and books on land use planning in the United States and tropical deforestation in Latin America.

Associate Professor of Sociology is currently conducting research on the indirect benefits of big-time intercollegiate athletics for colleges and universities. Over the years his research interests have also included labor markets, social networks, criminal careers and criminal sentencing, and bias and inequality in performance evaluations. He has taught a variety of statistics courses and sociology of sport at the graduate level.

Dr. Smith's research has focused on social networks, issues in criminology (recidivism, sentencing, criminal careers and risk assessment), work (labor markets, mobility, performance evaluation) and analytic methods (multidimensional scaling, simulations). Other areas of interest include small groups, sport and social psychology. Professor Smith teaches statistics, multivariate analysis, and advanced quantitative methods at the graduate level.

Chaim I. Waxman is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University where he served from as a member of the Department of Sociology from 1975 to 2006.  He has written and edited more than 18 books and more than 100 articles.

After retiring from Rutgers he moved to Jerusalem, Israel, where he continued to be active professionally and served as a senior fellow in several scholarly institutes.  In 2013, he was recruited by Jerusalem’s Hadassah Academic College to write a proposal for an undergraduate program in behavioral sciences.  When the proposal was approved by Israel’s Council for Higher Education, he was asked to head the new department which opened in the fall of 2016, where he continues to serve as Chair.

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Distinguished Professor in the Sociology Department and the Center of Alcohol Studies.  Her research focuses on the comorbidity of substance use, crime, violence, and mental health problems in community and high-risk samples. She also evaluates drug prevention interventions for college students.

Dr. White is currently engaged in longitudinal research on the antecedents, consequences and comorbidity of substance use and other problem behaviors in both community and high-risk samples. In addition, Dr. White develops and evaluates substance use prevention programs for college students. Her research has been sponsored by federal and foundation grants for the past 40 years. Dr. White has published one co-authored book, co-edited three books, and published more than 200 articles and chapters. She has served as a consultant for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Substance Abuse Prevention. Dr. White organized the founding of the Section on Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco of the American Sociological Association and was chair of that section twice. Currently Dr. White serves on several journal Editorial Boards and Advisory Boards of major longitudinal studies and regularly reviewers grants for various National Institutes of Health study sections. Dr. White has taught an undergraduate course on alcohol problems in the Sociology Department. She is located at the Center of Alcohol Studies, Piscataway.

Associate Professor of Sociology, teaches courses in the sociology of identity and race and the sociology of symbolic boundaries. One area of interest for Dr. Williams is the development of "racial" and "national" identities within the context of macro and mid-range social structures. Another area of interest is around contemporary cultural forms of social system legitimization. He is currently at work on, "Scanning the Horizon: Local TV News in the Reproduction of Social Inequality," a book which argues that local TV news serves a significant role in the legitimization of existing social inequality.

One area of interest for Dr. Williams is the social construction of identity within the context of macro and mid-range social structures. Of specific concern within that regard is the development of "racial" and "national" identities. His book Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Social Construction of Black and Irish Identities in the U.S. (Cambridge University Press, 1990) is a reflection of his thinking about those issues. Another area of interest is around contemporary cultural forms of social system legitimation. While the first interest is with the historical processes by which contemporary identities were developed, this aspect of his work focuses upon how those identities are continually re-enforced and reshaped by contemporary mass media. He is currently at work on, "Scanning the Horizon: Local TV News in the Reproduction of Social Inequality," a book which argues that local TV news serves a significant role in the legitimation of existing social inequality.