Dudley L. Poston, Jr. is Professor of Sociology, and the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts, at Texas A&M University.  He also holds the positions of Guest Professor of Demography at the People’s University , Beijing, China, and Guest Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China. He was appointed to the first position by the Chinese Government in 1999, and to the second in 2002.

Dr. Poston joined Texas A&M University in 1992, and served as the Head of the Department of Sociology from 1992 to 1997. He previously served on the Rural Sociology and Sociology faculties, respectively, of Cornell University (1988-1992), and The University of Texas at Austin (1970-1988), where he was also affiliated with the Population Research Center (University of Texas) and the Population and Development Program, and the East Asia Studies Program (Cornell University). He was Chair of the Department of Rural Sociology at Cornell University from 1989 to 1992, and he was Director of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin from 1981 to 1986. His research interests include demography, human ecology, and the sociology of gender, with special attention to the populations of China, Taiwan, and Korea. At Texas A&M he teaches undergraduate classes in demography and the sociology of gender, and graduate classes in demography, demographic methods, and statistics.

Dr. Poston received the Research Excellence Award from the Rural Sociological Society in 1994. In 1998 he received a Distinguished Achievement in Research Award from Texas A&M University, and in 1999 he received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts of Texas A&M University. In 1991, he received a Distinguished Alumnus of the Year Award from the University of Oregon. He was a Visiting Research Professor of Sociology at the National Taiwan University in 1987.

Dr. Poston is currently (2002-2003) Vice-President of the Southwestern Social Science Association. He will serve as President-elect of the association in 2003-2004, and as President of the association in 2004-2005. Dr. Poston served (1995 through 1998) as the President of Research Committee 41 (Sociology of Population) of the International Sociological Association. He served (1995 through 1997) as President of the North American Chinese Sociologists Association. He served as President of the Southwestern Sociological Association in 1983-84. He served during 1975-1977 as the President of the Southern Regional Demographic Group (now known as the Southern Demographic Association). He has been elected to membership in Alpha Kappa Delta (1964), Gamma Sigma Delta (1991), Phi Beta Delta (1993), Phi Kappa Phi (1999), and the Sociological Research Association (1984).

Dr. Poston was born in San Francisco, California on 11-29-1940. He attended a Catholic seminary in his first few years of high school, and then transferred to St. Ignatius High School (in San Francisco) from where he graduated in 1958. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1963 with a B.A. degree in sociology, from San Francisco State College in 1967 with an M.A. degree in sociology, and from the University of Oregon (in Eugene, Oregon) in 1968 with a Ph.D. degree in sociology. He served on active duty in the U.S. Army as a First Lieutenant and as a Captain from 1968 to 1970, including a tour of nearly one full year in 1969-70 in South Vietnam. Among his military honors and awards are the Bronze Star, and the Army Commendation Medal, with one Oak Leaf cluster, both awarded in 1970 for his service in Vietnam. 

Dr. Poston has co-authored/edited ten books including Census 80: Continuing the Factfinder Tradition (1980); The Population of the South (1981);  Essays in Population Economics (1991); The Population of Modern China (1992); Thirty Million Texans? (1993); Zhongguo Dusheng Zinu Yanjiu (Research on Single Children in China) (1996); Continuities in Sociological Human Ecology (1998); and the Chinese Triangle of Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (2001). He has also published over 200 refereed journal articles, chapters and reports on various sociological and demographic topics. He is currently co-editing (with Michael Micklin) the Handbook of Population, scheduled to be published in 2003 by Klewer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

He has been the principal/co-principal investigator of research grants awarded by the National Science Foundation (1976-78; 1979-80), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1979-80; 1981-82; 1981-84; 1982-84; 1986-88; 1989-93), the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy (1983-87); the Social Science Research Council (1987-88), the Ford Foundation (1989-90), the Rockefeller Foundation (1989-91), and the New York Lung Association (1990-92).

Dr. Poston married Patricia Mary Joyce Poston in San Francisco, California in 1963. They are now members of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic parish, in College Station, Texas.

The Postons have two children, Nancy Kathleen Poston Espey of San Antonio (born in San Francisco in 1964), and Dudley L. Poston III of Tulsa, Oklahoma (born in San Francisco in 1966). Their family also includes their son-in-law Richard W. Espey (born in Texas in 1962), and three grandchildren, David L. Espey (born in Texas in 1991), Kara Margaret Espey (born in Texas in 1994), and Daniel Lee Espey (born in Taejon City, South Korea in 2001).