Prof. Heather Hofmeister, Ph.D.

Biography

Heather Hofmeister was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and raised in Houston, Texas, where she studied sociology at Rice University, participated in the honors program in Sociology and received her B.A. in 1995. Hofmeister moved to Ithaca, New York in 1995 and earned a Masters degree in Sociology from Cornell University in 1998 with a thesis on late-midlife couples’ retirement status, gendered employment history, and their impacts on marital quality. In 2002, she earned her Ph.D. in Sociology for her dissertation on the relationships among work structure, family structure, and community structure and the ways these are manifested in the couples’ commute pattern. A shorter version of this work won an award at the 2002 Business and Professional Women/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Conference for Best Graduate Student Paper.

Hofmeister’s graduate work was funded by grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Institute on Aging, through the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute and the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute. Both institutes were located within the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell University.

During the 2001-2002 school year, Hofmeister served as a visiting professor at Ithaca College, teaching courses on social structure, urban sociology, inequality, and the family and received additional university-level teaching training through the Center for Faculty Excellence.

Hofmeister moved to Germany in June 2002 to accept a position as an Assistant Professor (“wissenschaftliche Assistentin”) at the Chair for Sociology I at Bamberg University, chaired by Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Blossfeld, where students twice ranked her her teaching best out of 29 instructors in the social sciences.

Also in Bamberg beginning in 2002, Hofmeister served as a senior research scientist in the Globalife project, where she specialized on the U.S. in comparative and life course perspective and gained longitudinal data analysis experience. Her responsibilities immediately increased to include coordinating the work of 22 other scientists for the project phase on women’s careers in 13 countries. She edited the results into the volume Globalization, Uncertainty, and Women’s Careers: An International Comparison, co-edited with Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Blossfeld (Edward Elgar 2006).

In Summer 2003 Hofmeister was promoted to the Deputy Director of the Globalife Project, including the management of the Working Paper Series, the production and dissemination of interim and final reports, budget management, communication with publishers, and the direct management of a staff of 10 part-time assistants to produce camera-ready copy and graphics for two 450-page scientific volumes. In 2006, the Globalife Project placed as a finalist for the 2006 Descartes Prize for Scientific Research.

Hofmeister joined the Sociology faculty of RWTH Aachen University as a Professor of Sociology with the focus on Gender Studies beginning on the first of April, 2007. This position is a first for RWTH Aachen University. As of September 2008 Hofmeister additionally holds the position of Vice-Rector for Human Resources in Management and Develpment, the first woman Vice-Rector and first Human Resources Vice-Rector for RWTH Aachen University.

Research interests and publications focus on Aging and the Life Course, Gender, Sociology of Work and Family, Social Change, Social Stratification and Inequality, Social Institutions, Culture, Geography and Spatial Mobility.

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