Richard P. Appelbaum, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He currently serves as Director of the M.A. Program in Global & International Studies, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He is also Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies in the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. He has previously served as chair of the Sociology Department, and was founder and Acting Director of the UCSB Global & International Studies Program.

 

He received his B.A. from Columbia University, M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

 

He has received numerous awards and commendations for excellence in teaching, including the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences. He has served as an elected Council Member of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association, as well as its President. He is on the Board of Consulting Editors of the Encyclopedia of Housing. He served as a faculty representative to the University of California Advisory Committee on Trademark Licensing, and currently chairs the Advisory Council of the Workers' Rights Consortium. He is the author of the report of the Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops, for which he served as a founding member. He has been a co-PI (and served on the Executive Committees of) the NSF-funded Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science, Spatial Perspectives on Curriculum Enhancement, and currently the Center for Nanotechnology in Society.

 

He has published extensively in the areas of social theory, urban sociology, public policy, the globalization of business, and the sociology of work and labor, and is currently engaged in two principal research projects: a multi-disciplinary study of supply chain networks in the Asian-Pacific Rim, and a study of high technology development (focusing on nanotechnology) in China.