William Clark

William Clark is Research Professor of Geography at UCLA and an active affiliate of the California Population Center. He was born in New Zealand and earned BA and MA degrees from the University of New Zealand and a PhD in Geography from the University of Illinois. He was a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 1993, and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994-95. In 1994 he was awarded a D.Sc. by the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and in 2003 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 he was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences and in that year he also received the Decade of Behavior Research Award for research that influences public policy. In the past ten years he has lectured and taught in Europe, New Zealand and Canada and in 2011 held an UK Economic and Social Research Council Fellowship at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He was a Benjamin Meaker Research Fellow, at Bristol University, United Kingdom in 2014. At the Association of American Geographers meetings in 2018 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award.

His research focuses on mobility, migration and housing choice and housing outcomes. Each of these areas continues his long term interest in demographic change in large urban areas. He has published extensively on models of residential mobility and the sorting processes that bring about residential segregation in the urban mosaic His research is focused on how demographic changes and specifically the spatial outcomes of both internal and international population migration change neighborhoods. The edited volume, with David Clapham and Ken Gibb (The Sage Handbook of Housing, 2012) brings together work on residential change, housing choice, housing markets and policy issues on the future of housing. A forthcoming book reviews recent research in Housing Studies.

His studies of immigration and its impacts both on places and on the immigrants themselves are set out in two books, The California Cauldron: Immigration and the Fortunes of Local Communities and Immigrants and the American Dream: Remaking the Middle Class. The California Cauldron focuses on the impact of immigration on California, and Immigrants and the American Dream examines how immigrants have transformed themselves as their life courses intersect with the American mainstream. Both examine the way in which immigrants change local communities and how they succeed in their life course trajectories.