Robert D. Mare

Robert Denis Mare (1951–2021) was an American sociologist and demographer best known for research on social stratification. He received numerous prestigious awards and had his research covered in the popular press. Mare served as president of the Population Association of America (PAA) in 2010 and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. At the time of his death, he had recently retired from a position as distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Early life and education
Mare was born in North Vancouver, Canada, in 1971. He completed his undergraduate degree at Reed College in 1973 and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University Michigan, where he was also a trainee at the Population Studies Center, in 1977.

Career
Mare was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, where he was well known for mentorship, from 1977 to 1997, moving up through the ranks from assistant to full professor. Mare was a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1983 to 1984, and a visiting senior social scientist at the RAND Corporation from 1994 to 1995. He directed the University of Wisconsin's Center for Demography and Ecology from 1989 to 1994. In 1997, Mare moved to UCLA, where he also held an appointment in statistics. He founded the California Center for Population Research in 1998 and became a distinguished professor in 2007.

Mare's research examined social trends in education, work, marriage, and residential and social mobility. He studied the reproduction of social inequality across generations and the self-perpetuation of social hierarchies. Mare found, for example, an increase between 1960 and 2010 in the proportion of American couples in which both members have a college degree, demonstrating that such a pattern can also increase inequality in the resources available to children, with implications for children's own achievement. His research on marriage received coverage in such media outlets as The Atlantic and The New York Times. Mare is perhaps best known for the "Mare Model," according to which a person's educational trajectory is understood as the product of a sequence of decisions made at successive stages.

Mare received numerous awards and recognitions, particularly in the last two decades of his career. In addition to awards for specific articles, Mare received the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award for lifetime achievement from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1999 and the Robert M. Hauser Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the ASA in 2016. He served as president of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 28 on Social Stratification and Mobility in 2006 and president of the PAA in 2010. He was an elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, both in 2010.

Personal life
Mare was married to Judith Seltzer, also a sociologist and demographer retired from UCLA, who served as President of the PAA in 2016. They met in graduate school at the University of Michigan. Mare died of leukemia on February 1, 2021.