Karl Ulrich Mayer, the newly appointed Stanley B. Resor Professor of Sociology, conducts research in the areas of social stratification and mobility, the sociology of aging and the life course, social demography, occupational structures and labor processes, and methods of survey research.
At Yale, he chairs the Department of Sociology and is co-director of the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), of which he was the founding director 2003 through 2007. He is also a professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Mayer has received major grants for his research, which includes a German life history study, a Berlin aging study and an examination of age-specific effects of migration in Israel and Germany. He is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, including “Skill Formation: Interdisciplinary and Cross-National Perspectives,” “After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Life Courses in the Transformation of East Germany,” “The Comprehensive School Experiment Revisted: Evidence from Western Europe” and “The Berlin Aging Study: Aging from 70 to 100.” He is the editor of the CIQLE’s Yale Series in Sociology and is a founding editor of the European Sociological Review.
Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2003, Mayer spent more than 20 years as director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, head of the Center for Sociology and the Study of the Life Course and co-director of the Berlin Aging Study. He studied at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and earned his B.A. at Gonzaga University, his M.A. at Fordham University and his Ph.D. at the University of Constance, Germany. He completed advanced study at the University of Mannheim in Germany. He held positions at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Mannheim, and was director of the German National Survey Research Center. From 1993 to 1999 he served as a member and vice-chair of the German National Science Council.
Mayer has been a visiting professor at universities in the United States and in Europe. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
