Professor Mayer Zald passed away on August 7, 2012.  

Mayer Zald was a professor emeritus of sociology, social work, and business administration at the University of Michigan, where he had taught since 1977. He earned his BA (1953) at the University of Michigan and a MS (1955) from the University of Hawaii before serving in the US Army. After his honorable discharge from the Army, he returned to the University of Michigan to complete a Ph.D. in Social Psychology in 1961. 

Zald taught at the University of Chicago and Vanderbilt University, before returning to the University of Michigan in 1977 as a professor of sociology. He was chairman of the department of Sociology at both Vanderbilt (1971-1975) and Michigan (1981-1986; 1990-1992).  

Zald was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as the vice president of the American Sociological Association. He wrote more than 100 articles and book chapters and edited or wrote twenty books. Zald's article with John McCarthy, "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory", American Journal of Sociology (May 1977), is one of the most influential and frequently cited articles in sociology. His 1966 article with Roberta Ash, "Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay, and Change", is one of the top ten most frequently cited articles ever published in the journal Social Forces. He served on the editorial boards of multiple professional journals related to sociology, and was the associate editor of the American Sociological Review from 1979-1982. In 2008 he received the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior from the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change at the University of Notre Dame.

A celebration of Professor Zald's life will be held on September 29th, 2012 at the University of Michigan Alumni Association Building, 200 Fletcher Street, Ann Arbor, MI. The event will begin at 2pm with a reception to follow.