Leif Jensen
Rural Fellow
Leif Jensen (Ph.D., Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is currently Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography at The Pennsylvania State University where he has been on the faculty since 1989. From 2003-2006 he also served as Director of Penn State's Population Research Institute.
His research interests are found within three broad areas. The first is social stratification with emphasis on issues of poverty, employment, and household economic strategies in rural and urban areas. The second is demography with special attention to migration and immigration. The third is the sociology of economic development with a focus on Latin America. His recent and ongoing research projects include studies of underemployment in the United States, the movement of immigrant groups to new destination communities in the U.S., the circumstances of youth in migrant farm worker families in Pennsylvania, and patterns of spatial inequality in Latin America. He teaches courses on poverty the United States, the sociology of economic development, and problems of children and youth in developing countries.
E-mail Leif Jensen at lij1@psu.edu.