Vera Institute of Justice

Christopher Wildeman is an associate professor of policy analysis and management in the college of human ecology at Cornell University, where he is also co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect and a faculty fellow at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR), the Center for the Study of Inequality, Court-Kay-Bauer Hall, and the Cornell Population Center. Since 2013, he has also been a visiting fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington D.C. Since 2015, he has also been a senior researcher at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Prior to joining Cornell’s faculty in 2014, Christopher was an associate professor of sociology, a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, as well as the co-director of the New Haven Branch of the Scholars Strategy Network. He received his PhD in sociology and demography from Princeton University in 2008. From 2008-2010, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health & society scholar and postdoctoral affiliate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. His research and teaching interests revolve around the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequality, with emphasis on families, health, and children. He is also interested in child welfare, especially as it relates to child maltreatment and the foster care system. He is the 2013 recipient of the Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology.