Mark Hayward is a professor of sociology, Centennial Commission Professor in the Liberal Arts, and a faculty research associate of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He recently served as the the president of the Southern Demographic Association and chair of the Aging and Life Course section of the American Sociological Association. He has served on the boards of the Population Association of America and the Society of Biodemography and Social Biology, and he was a member and then chair of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research council. Currently, he is a member of the Committee on Population, National Academy of Sciences, and the National Advisory Committee for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health and Society Scholars Program.

His primary research addresses how life course exposures and events influence the morbidity and mortality experiences of the adult population. Recent studies have clarified how early life conditions influence socioeconomic, race and gender disparities in adult morbidity and mortality; the demography of race/ethnic and gender disparities in healthy life expectancy; social inequality in the biomarkers of aging, and the health consequences of marriage, divorce, and widowhood. Most recently, he has been investigating the fundamental inequalities in adult mortality in the United States arising from educational experience, differences in these associations by race and gender, and the growing educational inequality in mortality. His research on these topics has been by the National Institute on Aging and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. His recently published work has appeared in the American Journal of Public Health, Demography, the Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Social Science and Medicine.

Professor Hayward has served on a number of scientific advisory boards at universities around the country as well as the National Institutes of Health. He has a long-standing interest in enhancing the measurement and collection of population health data, particularly longitudinal data, and has served on the advisory boards of a number of national studies of population health.