Ruben G. Rumbaut

Rubén G. Rumbaut is a Cuban-American sociologist and a leading expert on immigration and refugee resettlement in the United States. He has been on the sociology faculty of the University of California, Irvine since 2002 and was named Distinguished Professor of Sociology there in 2015, after earlier posts at the University of California, San Diego, San Diego State University and Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Brandeis University in 1978. He is best known for research on immigration and refugee movements, generations and transitions to adulthood, including the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study that he directed with Alejandro Portes from 1991, and he is described as one of the original architects of the segmented-assimilation paradigm. His book Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation won the American Sociological Association award for Distinguished Scholarship in 2002.