Bio
Before coming to Yale in 2003, Karl Ulrich Mayer spent more than twenty years as Director at 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 now is Director Emeritus of the Max-Planck-Institute in Berlin. He received his training in Sociology, Philosophy and German Literature at the University of Tübingen, Gonzaga University (BA, 1966), Fordham University (M.A., 1967), the University of Konstanz (Dr., 1973), and the University of Mannheim (Habilitation, 1977). He held positions at the Universities of Frankfurt/Main and Mannheim and as Director of the German National Survey Research Center (ZUMA). From 1993 to 1999 he served as member and Vice-Chair of the German National Science Council. Dr. Mayer is a member of the European Academy of Sciences, the German Academy of Natural Sciences (Leopoldina) and of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Founding Member of the European Academy of Sociology, a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course in 1999. In 2004 he was awarded the Fellowsip of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Mayer’s research is in the areas of social stratification and mobility, sociology of the life course, social demography, occupational structures and labor market processes, and methods of survey research.