 Will Professor David Harding please join me at the lectern or on the White Axe to be more precise? Sociologist David Harding ranks amongst the country's most prominent young scholars of poverty and inequality. Employing highly original analysis, he's illuminated processes by which urban poverty is reproduced at the individual level. In his recent book, Living the Drama, Community Conflict and Culture Among Inner City Boys, Professor Harding examines the role of neighborhoods in adolescent outcomes related to education and romantic and sexual behavior. Based on quantitative data and interviews with teens in poor and working class neighborhoods, he determined that violence in poor and urban neighborhoods is socially patterned. Violence reshapes the culture and social structure so dramatically that it leads boys to embrace behavior, including dropping out of school, that contribute to the reproduction of poverty. Professor Harding also developed the Neighborhood Cultural Heterogeneity Theory, which postulates that youths in poor neighborhoods are exposed to greater variation in cultural models of conduct than adolescents in middle class communities. Professor Harding, a member of the university faculty since 2006, has published widely. He serves on the editorial boards of Sociological Methodology and Sociological Methods and Research, and recently co-edited a special edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science devoted to culture and poverty. In 2007, Professor Harding received the University of Michigan Summer Research Opportunity Programs Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award. Professor Harding, in recognition of your path-breaking research on poverty and inequality, your teaching mentoring and service, and your scholarly promise, the university presents you the Henry Russell Award.