Professional Trajectory

Jennie E. Brand completed her undergraduate education in sociology and philosophy at UC-San Diego in 1997. In 1998, she began graduate study at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She completed her Master's in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2004. She was thereafter a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Prof. Brand moved to Chapel Hill in 2006 with a Carolina Population Center post-doctoral fellowship and a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2007, she joined the sociology department at UCLA as Assistant Professor. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and promoted to Professor in 2016. She served as Associate Director of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) from 2011 through 2016 and 2017-18. She was appointed a Professor of Statistics in 2017 and is currently the Center for Social Statistics (CSS) co-director. Prof. Brand became Director of CCPR in 2018.

Prof. Brand's publications have appeared in leading journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, American Sociological Review (ASR), American Journal of Sociology (AJS), Social Forces, Annual Review of Sociology, and Demography. Her 2010 ASR article on college benefits was named the “Sage Most Downloaded Article” (of all articles published in ASR in 2009 and 2010), received the American Sociological Association (ASA) Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section Distinguished Article Award for 2011, and the ASA Sociology of Education section James Coleman Award for 2012. Her 2014 AJS article on job displacement among single mothers was a finalist for the International Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award. Prof. Brand received honorable mention for the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility William Julius Wilson Early Career Award in 2014. She received the ASA Methodology Leo Goodman Award in 2016. She was awarded a National Institute for Health (NIH) R01 UCLA subaward for 2013-19.

Prof. Brand was elected to serve as President of the Association of Population Centers (APC) (2023-25) and to serve on the Population Association of America (PAA) Board of Directors (2023-25). She was elected to three American Sociological Association (ASA) section councils in recent years: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility (2015-18), Sociology of Education (2013-16), and Methodology (2012-15). She was elected Chair of the Methodology section for 2019-21, Chair of the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section for 2021-22, and a Board Member for the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (ISA-RC28, 2018-23). She was appointed to the Board of Overseers for the General Social Survey (GSS) (2016-20) and to the Technical Review Committee for the National Longitudinal Surveys Program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2019-22). She was elected to the Sociological Research Association (SRA) in 2019, an honor society for excellence in research. Prof. Brand was Associate Editor for Science Advances, the open-access extension of Science Magazine, and serves on the editorial boards of Social Forces, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Science, and Sociology Compass. Prof. Brand has also served on editorial boards of ASA’s flagship journal, American Sociological Review, and the Population Association of America’s (PAA) flagship journal, Demography, SAGE Research Methods in the Social Sciences Foundation, and several other leading journals.

Prof. Brand has served on over three dozen university committees (in Sociology, CCPR, and CSS) over the last few years alone. For example, she served on the Sociology and CCPR executive committees, CCPR and CSS seed grant committees, sociology search committees, and various committees at CCPR related to development and training. She serves on the Social Science Division Big Data Infrastructure Committee, Social Sciences Center for Education, Research, and Technology Faculty Advisory Committee, co-organized the UCLA Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) in 2019 and 2020, and is developing a Social Data Science minor at UCLA. Prof. Brand supervises and co-authors papers with many graduate students, and she has served on or chaired over two dozen master’s committees and over three dozen doctoral committees. Nine students for whom she chaired doctoral committees have completed their PhDs in the last five years and secured positions in tenure track or research jobs. She is the faculty sponsor for the Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility Sociology Working Group.

Personal Trajectory

Jennie Brand grew up in Los Angeles. She met her husband, Stephen Brand, in high school in 1994. They were married in 1997. Her daughter, Sarah, was born in 1998, during her first year of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Sarah received her Bachelor's degree in sociology and history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2020 and her Master in Science degree in Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2021. Her son, Joshua, was born in 2005, during her second year of post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan. Joshua is in high school.