Kathleen Mullan Harris elected lifetime AAAS fellow

Faculty Fellow Kathleen Mullan Harris is among the 443 scientists selected this year as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. She was cited for “for distinguished contributions to the field of social demography, particularly for research and data generation in relation to genetic aspects of health and social behavior.”

New fellows will receive an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin Feb. 15 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington. Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. This year’s AAAS fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on Nov. 29.

Harris is the James E. Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology in the College of Arts & Sciences and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center. She is an internationally recognized scholar of social inequality, specializing in the substantive areas of family, poverty and health. Harris has been at the forefront of revolutions in research design, data collection, and data dissemination within the social and behavioral sciences and has pioneered an integrative research program that merges social and biomedical sciences to advance knowledge on the development of health and social stratification trajectories across the life course. View a video about her research.