Dr. Richard P. Appelbaum
Executive Committee
Center for Nanotech in Society
Richard P. Appelbaum, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hew is a co-Principal Investigator at UCSB’s NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He currently serves as Director of the M.A. Program in Global & International Studies. He is also Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies in the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research. He has previously served as chair of the Sociology Department, and was founder and Acting Director of the UCSB Global & International Studies Program.
He received his B.A. from Columbia University, M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
He has published extensively in the areas of social theory, urban sociology, public policy, the globalization of business, the sociology of work and labor, and the social impacts of nanotechnology. In addition to numerous scholarly papers, he has published policy-related and opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times and The American Prospect.
He is currently engaged in two principal research projects: a multi-disciplinary study of supply chain networks in the Asian-Pacific Rim, and a study of high technology development (focusing on nanotechnology) in China.