Professor Sonalde Desai Reflects on her 30 Years in SOCY

The University of Maryland Distinguished University Professor is retiring in June, and leaving the Department of Sociology with a parting gift

Distinguished University Professor Sonalde Desai didn’t think she’d stay at the University of Maryland for the remainder of her career—evidenced by the fact that she didn’t sign up for the State Retirement and Pension System, she laughingly admits.

“The university was such a good home for the kind of work that I was doing, I never thought of leaving,” she said.

As Desai prepares to retire in June after 30 years with the UMD Department of Sociology, she’s looking back at how UMD positively impacted her life—and her colleagues are looking back at how she positively impacted theirs.

On Joining UMD

Desai joined UMD in 1994 after applying for a position designed to support a program on population, gender and social inequality that was so specific and so in line with area of expertise that she originally thought the position must have been for a targeted hire.

“It was a perfect fit for me to come here,” she said of her decision to leave her prior role as an associate of The Population Council, a research organization dedicated to building an equitable and sustainable world that enhances the health and well-being of current and future generations.

Of all the memories Desai has made at UMD since then, Desai says that joining the university is still the standout.

“One of the best things that’s happened to me is joining Maryland at a time when there were stalwarts in our department and across campus who were willing to be mentors,” said Desai. “Harriet Presser was one of my mentors when I came in and I always think of her when I think about my time at Maryland.”

Not only did the late Harriet Presser help Desai with the challenging transition from “being a young scholar who can do research, to being someone who starts building a professional career where you mentor students and develop new programs that you lead,” she also gave Desai an interesting perspective on research.

“Harriet told me once that she started doing research on teenage fertility because she became a mother at a very young age, and I found myself doing the same thing. I started doing research in childcare after my first child was born,” she said. “What I learned from Harriet is that sometimes our lives and our experiences inform our research, and it’s a good thing.”

On Staying at UMD

In addition to feeling “so fortunate” for her UMD colleagues and mentors, another reason Desai decided to stay at UMD was because of her research experiences there.

“I led a program on gender and reproductive choice in India, and it was my first grant after coming to Maryland,” said Desai.

That grant was the first of many research grants Desai would go on to receive while at UMD. Perhaps most notably, Desai has served as the principal investigator of the India Human Development Survey, India’s first longitudinal survey of more than 40,000 households fielded since 2004. With support from funders like the National Institutes of Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the UK Department of International Development, the IHDS has allowed thousands of scholars to study India’s changing society over an era of rapid social transformation.

Under Desai’s leadership, the IHDS has provided many UMD students with an incredible experiential learning opportunity.

“Sonalde learned and mastered navigating all the stakeholders and institutions to get cooperation from all parties involved. Her energy and her focus were incredible,” said Mitali Sen, SOCY Ph.D. ’00, who worked with Desai during the first IHDS panel. “Despite all her responsibilities, if she saw a spark in you, she would push you to do and be your best. For a student, that is an incredible gift. She was the wind beneath many, many sails, including mine!”

Desai also played an important role in  the Maryland Population Research Center, which draws together leading scholars from diverse disciplines to support, produce and promote population-related research of the highest scientific merit. In 2022, she served as the president of the Population Association of America—the major national organization for the cross-disciplinary group of researchers who carry out population research—and was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

On Retiring from UMD

In thanks to the Department of Sociology and the University of Maryland for their support of Desai’s research on social transformation in the Global South, she recently gave $100,000 to establish the Dr. Sonalde B. Desai Current-Use Research Fund in Sociology. The fund will provide SOCY students and faculty with grants supporting research focused on societies outside the United States.

“If you are going to focus on studying other parts of the world, you cannot do it only sitting within the beltway. You need to find a way to get outside and see what the world is like, and yet you need resources to be able to do that,” explained Desai. 

Desai says that she has seen many students and faculty struggle to afford to initiate projects similar to her own career’s work, and she hopes this new fund will help.

“Professor Desai has made sustained, important contributions to our department, the college, the university, and the discipline of sociology. Her contributions are extensive and have always had a global orientation,”  said Jeff Lucas, SOCY professor and chair. “Her generous gift to the department will help sustain her legacy of promoting and spearheading impactful international research.”

“I hope that this funding will help increase understanding about, and connection between, the social changes that are happening around the world, and infuse the research of our students and our faculty with something that is driven by what is actually going on, rather than what’s going on in an imaginary world that's being constructed inside the beltway,” she said.

Make a gift to the Dr. Sonalde B. Desai Current-Use Research Fund in Sociology

Published on Mon, May 20, 2024 - 10:40AM