He is a professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
[1] In 1968, he joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University as an assistant professor.
He has also conducted research in India (with Tibetan refugees in Bylakuppe), in northwest Nepal (with a Tibetan border community in Limi), in western Mongolia (with a nomadic pastoral community in Khovd Province) and in inland China (with Han Chinese on modernization and the elderly).
He completed an NSF study investigating modernization and changing patterns of intergenerational relations in rural Tibet from 2005 to 2007.
[6] The first volume in the series, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State, written with the assistance of Gelek Rimpoche,[7] was awarded Honorable Mention for the Joseph Levenson Book Prize in 1989 by the Association for Asian Studies.