Christopher Wildeman wins Clifford C. Clogg Award for Mid-Career Achievement

Christopher Wildeman, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and director of the Duke Cook Center’s Carceral Justice research pillar, received the 2026 Clifford C. Clogg Award for Mid-Career Achievement at the Population Association of America’s (PAA) annual conference in May.

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The Clifford C. Clogg Award honors outstanding, innovative scholarly achievements of population professionals who have attained their highest professional degree within the previous 10-20 years. Sponsored by PAA in association with the Population Research Institute of the Pennsylvania State University, it commemorates the memory and creative contributions of Clifford C. Clogg to the field of quantitative methods and labor force demography.

“I’m incredibly grateful to receive this specific award for two reasons,” said Wildeman. “First, and most importantly, so many of Clifford Clogg’s contributions came in the form of mentorship, which is something I have hoped to emulate in my own career. Second, having spent most of the last 20 years trying to move peripheral topics in demography like the criminal justice system and the child welfare system into the core, it is deeply gratifying to feel like this award indicates I might have had at least a modicum of success in doing so.”

Wildeman’s work focuses on the prevalence, causes and consequences of contact with the criminal legal system and the child welfare system for families. He was the recipient of the American Society of Criminology’s Ruth Shonle Cavan Young Scholar Award and the PAA’s 2008 Dorothy Thomas Award for the best graduate student paper on the interrelationships among social, economic and demographic variables.

In 2016, Wildeman received the Outstanding Book Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section of the American Sociological Association for Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality, co-written with Sara Wakefield. He has published five articles in the journal Demography, and his publications have been cited almost 17,000 times.

Since 2018, Wildeman has managed the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, which compiles and shares information collected from leading researchers and national data collection efforts. He also conceptualized and led the design of the Family History of Incarceration (FamHIS) and Family Incarceration Costs Surveys, the first surveys designed specifically to measure the prevalence of family incarceration and its financial tolls.

“Dr. Wildeman has been central to the expansion of demographic approaches to the study of how the criminal justice and child welfare systems reflect and (re)produce population inequality,” said Tyson Brown, professor of Sociology and director of the Cook Center on Social Equity. “He has created foundational datasets for the study of demography and inequality that are vital to the future of demographic research.”