Russell K. Schutt, Ph.D. is 2019-2020 Chair of the American Sociological Association’s section on Evolution, Biology, and Society. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Lecturer (part-time) in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Clinical Research Scientist I at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Research Associate at the Veterans Health Administration (Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Hospital). His research and publications focus on the social environment and individual functioning, service preferences, and the organization and delivery of public programs, in relation to homelessness, mental illness, public health, and organizational and legal processes, with more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, and books that include Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (co-edited), Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness (both Harvard University Press), and research methods texts with SAGE Publications that include Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research (now in its 9th edition). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Cancer Institute, the Veterans Health Administration, the Fetzer Institute, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
If sociologists come to recognize that sociality and group process underlie the evolution of our species and are inherent in our biology, the use of field sites will become not just a means of framing sociological research but a clarion call for transdisciplinary recognition of the centrality of our discipline.