Mark Western is a CEPS Chief Investigator and a Director of the Institute for Social Science Research, The University of Queensland. He was previously a Director of The University of Queensland Social Research Centre which he helped establish. His research focuses on the impact of large-scale social change on social and economic inequality, politics and culture, and family and household formation in contemporary societies like Australia. Mark is also interested in the use of quantitative methods in social science and is presently undertaking research into methods for analysing certain kinds of longitudinal data. Mark has been an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Madison, a Hallsworth Visiting Professor in Political Economy at the University of Manchester and is an International Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University. He is a member of the College of Experts of the Australian Research Council, an Executive Committee Member of the Australian Social Science Data Archive, and a member of the Management and Strategic Planning Committees of the Australian Research Council Network for Spatially Integrated Social Science (ARCRNSISS). Between 2000 and 2004, he was Treasurer of the Australian Sociological Association. He was also Treasurer of the Local Organising Committee for the XVth World Congress of Sociology held in Brisbane in 2002.