Lawrence D. Bobo is Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He has served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. He holds appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Department of African and African American Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, social inequality, politics, and race.

His research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He is a founding editor of the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-author of the award winning book Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (Harvard University Press, 1997, with H. Schuman, C. Steeh, and M. Krysan) and senior editor of Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000, with M. L. Oliver, J. H. Johnson, and A. Valenzuela). His most recent book Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute (Harvard University Press, 2006, with M. Tuan) was a finalist for 2007 C. Wright Mills Award. He is currently working on the Race, Crime, and Public Opinion project.

Dean Bobo is an elected member of the National Academy of Science as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, an Alphonse M. Fletcher Sr. Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. He has held tenured appointments in the sociology departments at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Stanford University where he was Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.