Chris is Distinguished Professor and Co-Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 1975. Chris has done cross-national quantitative studies of the effects of dependence on foreign investment, and he studies cities and settlement systems in order to explain human sociocultural evolution. His research focuses on interpolity systems, including both the modern global political economy and earlier regional world-systems. Chris is the founder and former editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and the Series Co-Editor of a book series published by Springer Verlag. In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2002, he was elected President of the Research Committee on Economy and Society (RC02) of the International Sociological Association. And, in 2008, Chris was elected Distinguished Senior Scholar of the International Political Economy (IPE) section of the International Studies Association.