Chandra Muller

Chandra Muller is Alma Cowden Madden Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on the long run effects of high school coursework on midlife work and financial security, health, and political participation, with an emphasis on social inequality by gender, social class, disability status, and immigration status. She is the principal investigator of the High School and Beyond (HS&B) Midlife Follow-up study (http://sites.utexas.edu/hsb/) (with Eric Grodsky and Rob Warren) that has interviewed members of the HS&B sophomore and senior cohorts in 2014-2015 (funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation) to study working longer and again in 2021 to study cognitive aging, funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). She is also the principal investigator (with Adam Brickman, Eric Grodsky, Jennifer Manly, and Rob Warren) of a follow-up study of the National Longitudinal Study of 1972 (NLS-72) to study the effects of education on cognitive aging (scheduled for 2024 data collection). Previously, she led studies of the college transcripts for members of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and the high school transcripts for members of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), both funded by National Institutes of Health. Professor Muller received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from University of California at Santa Barbara, a master’s degree in education from Stanford University and a MA and PhD in sociology from University of Chicago. She was a NAEd Spencer Foundation Post-doctoral fellow. Prior to earning her doctorate, Professor Muller was an elementary school classroom teacher.