2 017–2 018 Fa c u l t y P r o f i l e s
Fa c u l t y A s s o c i a t e s
Mel Stephens is professor of economics, with a courtesy appointment at the Ford School. He serves as a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center and a faculty associate at the Survey Research Center, both within the Institute for Social Research. Stephens is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is currently a research associate. He also is a member of the Academic Research Council at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Stephens is a labor economist whose current research interests include consumption and savings, aging and retirement, education, the impact of local labor market fluctuations on household outcomes, and applied econometrics. He received his BA in economics and mathematics from the University of Maryland and his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. Maris A. Vinovskis is the Bentley Professor of History, a research professor at the Center for Political Studies in the Institute for Social Research, and a courtesy professor at the Ford School. He has authored or co-authored ten books, the most recent being From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: National Education Goals and the Creation of Federal Education Policy, as well as edited or co-edited seven books. Vinovskis was the research advisor to the assistant secretary of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) in both the Bush and Clinton Administrations. He was a member of the congressionally mandated independent review panel for the U.S. Department of Education for Goals 2000, as well as No Child Left Behind. Vinovskis is an elected member of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, and the American Educational Research Association, and is former president of the History of Education Society. He received his PhD in history from Harvard University. Alford A. Young, Jr. is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Sociology, with a joint appointment to the Department of African and African American Studies and a courtesy appointment as a professor of public policy at the Ford School. He has pursued research on low-income, urbanbased African Americans, employees at an automobile manufacturing plant, African American scholars and intellectuals, and the classroom-based experiences of higher-education faculty as they pertain to diversity and multiculturalism. He employs ethnographic interviewing as his primary data collection method. His objective in research on low-income African American men, his primary area of research, has been to argue for a renewed cultural sociology of the African American urban poor. Young received an MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago.
T he Fo r d S ch o o l a t M i chi gan
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