Daniel Schneider to serve as associate director of the Harvard Pop Center

Daniel Schneider, PhD, the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, has been appointed associate director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies by the Center’s new director, Rita Hamad, MD, PhD. Schneider has been a long-standing, engaged faculty member of the Harvard Pop Center, having served on the Social Demography Seminar committee, and having been actively involved in postdoctoral fellowship programs, both as an individual mentor and program advisor.

His overarching research interests are focused on social demography, inequality, and the family. He is co-director of The Shift Project, an unprecedented study he co-launched in 2022, that examines how precarious and unpredictable work schedules affect household economic security and the health and well-being of workers and their families. In early 2026, he and his colleague David Weil were awarded funding from Harvard Impact Labs to tackle the pressing societal problem of wage theft (when employers fail to pay wages and benefits to employees) by collaborating with several regional labor departments to develop data-driven tools for better enforcement and prediction.

Schneider holds a PhD in sociology and social policy from Princeton University, and earned a BA in public policy from Brown University. He completed an RWJF post-doctoral fellowship in health policy at Berkeley/UCSF, and was a member of the faculty at Berkeley from 2014–2020. He was also a trainee in the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, and an affiliate of both the Berkeley Population Center and the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at Berkeley.

“As associate director, Daniel will be instrumental in assisting me refresh the vision for the Pop Center, build upon our research portfolio, and expand the breadth of our training and engagement programs,” said Harvard Pop Center Director Rita Hamad. “I’ve been working alongside Danny ever since we were both at the University of California as junior faculty, and most recently, we’re collaborating on an evaluation of state paid family leave policies. I’m thrilled that he will be part of the leadership team.”