He received the 2006 Paul Lazarsfeld Award from the Methodology Section of the American Sociological Association, which recognizes outstanding contributions over a career to sociological methodology.
[1] He grew up in New Britain, Connecticut and earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and sociology from Dartmouth College in 1977.
After leaving Harvard he did a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a two-year fellowship at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
He was a founding member of Northwestern's Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics.
He is currently doing research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past sixty years.