Dalton Conley, PhD, MPPA

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research

1999

Dalton Conley is currently dean for the social sciences, as well as university professor at New York University (NYU.) He holds appointments at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service; as an adjunct professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); and as a senior advisor to the United Nations Millennium Project.

Conley’s research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations. In 2005, he became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, given annually to one young researcher in any field of science, mathematics or engineering. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master of public administration and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University, as well as a master of science in biology from NYU. He is also an alumnus of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research program (1996-1998).

He is currently pursuing a doctorate in biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying transgenerational phenotypic plasticity and socially regulated genes.

Watch this video, where Conley discusses his book, You May Ask Yourself: Thinking Like a Sociologist:

PubMed Link:

Click here for a list of Dalton Conley's available publications in PubMed.

Scholar Testimonials

The research support and freedom provided to me by the Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research program allowed me to dive even deeper into the social determinants of health. The result of this fellowship has been much more than the publication of a couple of books and some papers: It has been an ever-expanding career that lies at the intersection of the social and biological sciences, most recently exemplified by my pursuit of a second Ph.D. in molecular biology. I can honestly say that without the Investigator Awards program, I would not have crossed these disciplinary boundaries.