Forrest Deseran earned a BA in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1966 and a PhD in Sociology at Colorado State University in 1975. He was on the sociology faculty at Louisiana State University from1975 until July of 2002. From 1992 until 2001 he served as the Director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. His research has been published in nationally recognized journals and he was the editor of a book series for the Rural Sociological Society. His most recent research projects deal with the effects of welfare reform on women's employment and with the changing structure of the seafood industry in Louisiana. His teaching interests include symbolic interaction, the individual in society, deviant behavior, food and society, death and dying in American culture, and population studies. While at LSU, Dr. Deseran won awards for his teaching at the national, university, and departmental levels. In 1998 he was named an LSU Distinguished Alumni Professor. After he and his wife recently relocated to Glen Ellen, California, Dr. Deseran joined the Sociology Department at Sonoma State University as an adjunct lecturer. While at SSU, he has taught Population and Society (Soci 381), Introduction to Sociology (Soci 201), Death and Dying (Soci 332), Senior Seminar in Sociology (Soci 498), The Social Construction of Crime (CJA 375), Deviant Behavior (CJA 441/Soci 314), and First Year Experience Seminar (Univ 102), . When not doing research or teaching, he can be found riding his road bike on the back roads of Sonoma County.

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