Harriet A. Zuckerman

Harriet Zuckerman is Professor Emerita at Columbia University and former Senior Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Zuckerman received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1965 and an A.B. from Vassar College in 1958.

Serving as a professor of Sociology at Columbia for 27 years, and department chairman for four,  she was the first woman appointed to an assistant professorship in Sociology at Columbia and the first to become a full professor.  She was one of the early sociologists to study science as a social institution. Her research examined social stratification in science in books such as Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States and The Outer Circle: Women in the Scientific Community while her papers treated scientific misconduct, the emergence of scientific specialties, careers of men and women scientists, intellectual property rights in science and scholarship, and the referee process in assessing scientific publications. 

At the Mellon Foundation, she oversaw grant portfolios for supporting universities, scholars at all career stages, research institutes, research libraries, and the development of new lines of inquiry. She also supervised Foundation’s research grants on higher education. A book, Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities (co-authored with Ronald F. Ehrenberg, Jeffrey A. Groen and Sharon M. Brucker) examined the effectiveness of Mellon's programs aimed at increasing the share of those accepted by doctoral programs in the humanities who earn degrees and how long it took for them to do so. The same study followed the careers of doctoral recipients in or outside the academy and, in the latter case, whether and when they achieved tenure. She has also worked more recently on the introduction of errors into knowledge claims as ideas move from their originating disciplines to those that have adopted them. This research is part of her recent interest in sociological semantics—the appearance and demise of words and phrases as indicators of intellectual attention in science and scholarship.

Professor Zuckerman has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society where she recently served as a Vice President and chaired its nominations committee, she also holds honorary degrees from Eötvos Lorand, the University of Budapest, and Warwick University in the U.K.

She has served on the Committee on Selection of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and on the boards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Social Science Research Council, and as a trustee of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Having just stepped down from the board of Annual Reviews, Inc. a scientific publisher, and the MIT President's Visiting Committee in the Humanities, she is now on the Advisory Committee of the Columbia University Press.

When she retired from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it established a fellowship at Columbia in her name for graduate students completing their dissertations in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science.