Dr. Stepick is currently Director of the Immigration and Ethnicity Institute and Professor of Anthropology & Sociology at Florida International University in Miami. He has been conducting research on the impact of immigration on Miami for the past 20 years. His co-authored book, City on the Edge, on how immigration has changed Miami, has won two national awards, the Robert Park Award for the best book in Urban Sociology and the Anthony Leeds Award for the best book in Urban Anthropology. His most recent book, Pride Against Prejudice: Haitians in the United States has already gone through numerous printings. His latest manuscript, This Land is Our Land, which will be published by University of California Press, has been described as "superior" and providing a "new framework for understanding immigration and interethnic relations."

The American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology awarded him the Margaret Mead Award for his work with Haitian refugees. His law review article on U.S. refugee and asylum law is used as a definitive reference in classrooms at major law schools throughout the U.S.

He has received grants from all the major scientific research institutions, including the largest grant ever in Cultural Anthropology from the National Science Foundation. He recently served a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Immigrant Children and Health and on the Cultural Anthropology Panel of the National Science Foundation. Dr. Stepick has also testified before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs and his work has been used by the British House of Commons.

Dr. Stepick received his B.A. in Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his Ph.D. in Social Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He had a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, was a Visiting Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, and a Fulbright Fellow in Mexico. During 1994-95, he was a Visiting Scholar at the prestigious Russell Sage Foundation in New York. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently funded him to be principal investigator on a major grant to examine immigration, religion, and civic engagement in Miami.