Cornell University has named sociologist and demographer Daniel Lichter to direct the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center (BLCC). He is expected to broaden the universitywide center that focuses on work and family conflicts, aging and retirement into a national social sciences research center sponsoring work on human development and economic and family demography.

Chris Hallman/University Photography

Dan Lichter

"I envision broadening BLCC into a more general social sciences research center that not only focuses on the well-being of children, youth and families over the life course but also fills a niche in public policy and the family, population health and aging, human development and demography, and economic demography," said Lichter, who in late August left Ohio State University to be professor of policy analysis and management in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell.

The public policy areas that BLCC might hone in on include divorce law, child support and custody, welfare reform, father involvement, marriage education, Head Start, Medicare and Medicaid, he said. In the area of population health, child obesity, disability, health disparities, health promotion and health-care utilization are emerging as crucial issues.

"In human development and demography, work is needed in the areas of child and adolescent development and families, schools, neighborhoods, work and religion and how these settings impact development. In economic demography, poverty, intergenerational exchanges and spatial inequality are emerging as important issues," Lichter said.

These are areas in which Lichter has extensive experience. As a professor of sociology and population studies and director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State for the past six years and director of the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University for four years before that, Lichter is well-known for his research on family demography, social change and poverty. Both centers receive core funding from the National Institutes of Health.

For example, Lichter studies how changes in family structure -- such as cohabitation -- influence poverty, and the development of children in households with cohabiting adults.

"The rise in cohabitation means that almost 30 percent of children can expect to spend some time living with a single mother and her cohabiting partner. The implications for children are unclear. Less than 20 percent of poor, cohabiting women marry their partners within five years. The large majority break up," said Lichter, citing statistics from his previous research.

"I seek to better understand to what extent changes in child poverty and the differences between black and white families can be attributed to different marriage and family patterns or to limited job opportunities and economic conditions. Also, how do children fare economically, socially and academically when they grow up with single and cohabiting parents, since children often repeat the patterns of their parents?"

Lichter also is interested in how "marriage promotion" policies and other aspects of welfare reform influence child poverty; how new waves of immigrants moving to rural areas where jobs in meat packing, food processing and construction are affecting their socio-economic status, and how changes in intermarriage between racial minorities and whites suggest important changes in social distance between diverse population groups.

To broaden the scope of BLCC, Lichter plans to cultivate big science projects, such as grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, to strengthen BLCC as an intellectual bridge among colleges, departments and centers in support of multidisciplinary research, both basic and applied, on the well-being of children, youth and families, and to offer pre- and postdoctoral training in public policy and population studies with a new interdisciplinary population training program. His other plans include fortifying BLCC's outreach mission to serve the policy community and the public, forging more connections with other universities and sponsoring more seed grants, brown-bag seminars, annual conferences, lectures, working groups and training workshops.