Ruth Glass (1912–1990)

Ruth Adele Lazarus was born in Berlin to a German-Jewish family. She was working on a degree in social studies from the University of Berlin, but the rise of the Nazi regime and the threat against Jews forced her to flee to safety before graduation. She
studied at the University of Geneva and in Prague before arriving in London in the mid-1930s,
where she resumed her sociology studies at the London School of Economics. From 1940 until 1942, she was
senior research officer at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, and was awarded a master's degree. She returned to London in 1943 and became a lecturer and research officer at the Association for Planning and Regional
Reconstruction. In 1951 Ruth Glass became director of the social research
unit at University College London and founded the Centre for Urban Studies, becoming
director of research in 1958, a post she retained for more than 30 years. She was particularly interested in youth unemployment and town planning. She was author of the collection of essays entitled Cliches of Urban Doom (1988), partly based on her original studies in Berlin. She married twice: firstly in 1935 to Henry William Durant, the statistician and pioneer in the field of public opinion polling and secondly in 1942 to David Victor Glass, a sociologist and demographer.