The seeds of RICHARD ALBA's interest in ethnicity were sown during his childhood in the Bronx of the 1940s and 1950s and nurtured intellectually at Columbia University, where he received his undergraduate and graduate education, completing his Ph.D. in 1974. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University at Albany, SUNY, where he also directs the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis and the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research.  

His teaching and research focus mainly on race/ethnicity and international migration, in the U.S. and in Europe, where he has done research in France and in Germany, with the support of Fulbright grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the German Marshall Fund.  His books include Ethnic Identity:  The Transformation of White America (1990); Italian Americans:  Into the Twilight of Ethnicity (1985); and, most recently, Remaking the American Mainstream:  Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (2003), co-written with Victor Nee.

He has been elected President of the Eastern Sociological Society (1997-98) and Vice President of the American Sociological Association (2000-01).