Stanley Lieberson was born in Montreal and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of PS 253, JHS 234 and Abraham Lincoln Public High School. After two years at Brooklyn College, he was admitted to the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology. Much of his career involved work on race and ethnic relations in both the United States and elsewhere. His dissertation won the University's Colver-Rosenberger Prize, and was later revised and published by the Free Press as Ethnic Patterns in American Cities. He has written a number of other books dealing with race and ethnic relations, along with numerous papers on this topic in the leading journals. One of these books, A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880, received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. Other books on this topic include Language and Ethnic Relations in Canada and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (co-author, Mary C. Waters).