Alaka Basu's area of expertise and research is predominantly in the areas of reproductive health and family planning, gender and development and child health and mortality. She also has interests in population studies and culture and demographic behavior.

Rachel Bezner Kerr's research interests converge on the broad themes of sustainable agriculture, food security, health, nutrition and social inequalities, with a primary focus in southern Africa.

Robin Blakely-Armitage is a Senior Extension Associate with the Community & Regional Development Institute (CaRDI) and a member of the Department of Development Sociology. Her focus is on community development and the use of demographic data for strategic planning and informed decision-making.

David Brown's scholarship is motivated by an interest in explaining the determinants of spatial inequality in more developed nations. In particular, Professor Brown is interested in how processes of uneven national development shape opportunity structures and life chances of people living in various types of areas.

Allison M. Chatrchyan is the Director of the Cornell Institute for Climate Change and Agriculture. Trained in international environmental policy and politics, her research and outreach focuses at the interface between social, environmental, and agricultural systems. 

Mary Jo Dudley is currently involved in capacity building within the farmworker community in New York State. She is also engaged in research on farmworkers' contributions, farmworkers` perceptions about life in their new communities, farmworker empowerment, and gender and participation. Current research with farmworkers and farmers examines how to improve workplace relations.

Department of Development Sociology Chair
Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue's research program advances knowledge in the field of development sociology through substantive and methodological contributions in three areas: the sociology of education, social change, and the demography of inequality. His most recent research investigates the consequences of demographic change on a range of socioeconomic outcomes that include schooling, gender, and income inequality.

Nina Glasgow's scholarship is motivated primarily by an interest in aging in rural environments. Glasgow often uses life course theory and methods to investigate the timing, context, history and trajectories of events and transitions in the lives of older rural residents. Her research also focuses on health and health care in rural communities and what the implications are for community and rural development.

Jenny Goldstein's interests include political ecology, critical development studies, ecological history, science and technology studies, food and agriculture, and southeast Asia

Tom Hirschl's scholarly focus is on social class differentiation in contemporary society. He is working on a new method for measuring social class by developing a life course approach to identify the economic, social, and health correlates of social class.

Paula Horrigan is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture dedicated to examining and fostering the theory and practice of placemaking through her community-engaged teaching, research and outreach.

David Kay provides leadership for CaRDI programming in the areas of energy, land use and community development. His work on land use involves research, outreach, and training efforts that attempt to build community-based decision making capacity and to help weave local policy into a regionally coherent fabric. Recently, he has increasingly focused on the community and economic development implications of energy transitions.

Lori Leonard has a background in public health, and her work focuses on issues in medical sociology, gender studies, and the anthropology of policy. She is interested in the ways policies, planned improvement projects, changes in the natural world, and human responses to these events shape social and cultural life.

Fouad Makki's principal focus of interest over the past few years has been understanding forms of social power as they change over time, and the way economic systems intertwine with cultural forms in those transformations. Makki is particularly interested in development processes viewed from a broadly comparative and historical perspective, together with the various theories that attempt to account for them.

 
Trained as a historical sociologist, Philip McMichael's research examines capitalist modernity through the lens of agrarian questions, food regimes, agrarian/food sovereignty movements, and most recently the implications for food systems of agrofuels and land grabbing. This work centers the role of agri-food systems in the making of the modern world, including an examination of the politics of globalization via the structuring of agri-food relations.

Heidi Mouillesseaux-Kunzman is interested in an array of issues related to regional community and economic development, including community capacity building, learning networks, the role of higher education institutions in economic development, sustainable communities, agriculture and food systems, leadership and organizational development, impact assessment, and professional networks for peer-support and collaboration.

Situated in the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of “civic studies,” Scott Peters centers his work as a scholar and educator on the project of advancing democratic varieties of public engagement in the academic profession.

Max Pfeffer has served on and led National Research Council committees of the Water Science and Technology Board. Max has served as Chair of the Development Sociology Department, and the Associate Director of both the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station and the Cornell University Center for the Environment.

Gretchen Rymarchyk is Extension Associate for the New York State Rural Schools Program, and Deputy Executive Director for the Rural Schools Association of New York State. In addition to administrative duties and coordination of the NY Rural Schools annual conference, she connects New York's rural schools to researchers at Cornell University and beyond, helping schools address issues at the local, state, and national levels.

John Sipple has focused his research interests on the responses of public school districts to changes in state and federal policy. Central to his work are issues of community and organizational change and how they relate to learning opportunities for students across racial, socioeconomic, and geographic lines.

Larry Van De Valk is Executive Director of the Empire State Food and Agricultural Leadership Institute, or LEAD New York, a leadership development program for adult professionals in the food, agricultural and natural resource industries. His research interests are in the areas of leadership development theory, program evaluation, and the social capital building effect of leadership development initiatives.

Lindy Williams's academic interests are focused geographically in Southeast Asia and substantively in the areas of family sociology and population dynamics. Her research examines how both are influenced by changing social, economic, and environmental conditions.

Wendy Wolford's work addresses issues within and between the political economy of development, agrarian studies, social mobilization, land reform, and political ecologies of conservation.

John Zinda studies social and environmental change, primarily in rural China. His research and teaching examine how state policies and community practices intersect to shape livelihoods and landscapes in contexts of agricultural development programs, afforestation efforts, biodiversity conservation, tourism operations, and labor migration.