Professor
Greg J. Duncan
University of California, Irvine
Social scientist; Educator
Area
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Specialty
Education
Elected
2001
Greg J. Duncan is Distinguished Professor of Education, Economics, and Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. He is also Adjunct Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, where he served as the Edwina S. Tarry Professor from 2002 to 2008. Duncan is an expert on family and neighborhood poverty and child development. He spent the first two decades of his career at the University of Michigan working on, and ultimately directing, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data collection project, which, in 2001, was named by the National Science Foundation to be one of the 50 most significant NSF-funded projects in the organization's history. Beginning in the late 1980s, Duncan engaged in a number of interdisciplinary research networks and began to focus on the impacts of family and neighborhood conditions on children's cognitive and behavioral development. Duncan's research focuses on the effects of poverty on families and neighborhoods, and the intergenerational consequences of welfare use. He has investigated the concentration of persistent poverty among certain population subgroups, in particular African-Americans. Duncan and colleagues also have examined the life consequences for adolescents in families that receive at least partial income from welfare. He has written extensively about income distribution, child poverty and welfare dependence. Duncan's recent work has focused on assessing the role of school-entry skills and behaviors on later school achievement and attainment and the effects of increasing income inequality on schools and children's life chances. Duncan served as President of the Population Association of America in 2007-08, of the Midwest Economics Association in 2004-05, and of the Society for Research in Child Development in 2009-11. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex in England in 1999.
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