Mary C. Waters is a Harvard College Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She is the author of From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (with Stanley Lieberson) and of Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America, a study of the meaning of ethnicity for later generation whites in the United States, and numerous articles on racial and ethnic identity and immigrant assimiliation. Her most recent book, Black Identites: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities, is the winner of the Mirra Komorovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section and the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section, both of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race, Ethnicity and Politics of the American Political Science Association and the Distinguished Book Award of th Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. It is a study of first and second generation West Indian immigrants in New York City. Her current research focuses on patterns of assimilation among the second generation in New York, and patterns of racial intermarriage and identity formation in the U.S. She has consulted to the Census Bureau on issues of measurement of race and ethnicity, and testified before Congress on the issues involved in allowing more than one race to be collected by the Census Bureau. She was a member of the Panel on the Economic and Demographic Impacts of Immigration on the United States of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and she is a member of the International Immigration Committee of the Social Science Research Council, and the Research Network on the Transition to Adulthood of the MacArthur Foundation. She received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in Demography, and an M.A. and PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.