Robert D. Mare is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California - Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1998. At UCLA he served as the founding Director of the California Center for Population Research from 1998 to 2003. For 20 years prior to that, he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His areas of research expertise include social stratification, demography, and quantitative research methods with a focus on the connection between demographic processes and social inequality. He has conducted studies on inequality in educational opportunities, social mobility, youth unemployment, socioeconomic differences in mortality, residential segregation by income and race, residential mobility, marriage markets, family structure and poverty, migration, and statistical methods. Mare has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a winner of the ASA Methodology Section's Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award.

He has been a Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University, Visiting Senior Social Scientist at RAND, Visiting Fellow at New College, Oxford, and is a former Editor of DEMOGRAPHY. In 2010 he was President of the Population Association of America. From 2006 to 2010 he was been President of the Research Committee on Social Stratification of the International Sociological Association. In 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mare received a a B.A. in Sociology from Reed College in 1973, and and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1974 and 1977 respectively.