Michael Shanahan has been a Professor of Sociology at the University of Zurich since August, 2016, and will become Director of the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development in October of 2016. He studied sociology and child development at the University of Minnesota and was a post doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held professorships at Penn State University and UNC-Chapel Hill and was Hewlett Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (1998/1999). His main research interests include life course sociology theory and methods, with a focus on individual differences in the life course, particularly genetic factors.