Rob Crosnoe's main research areas include the life course and human development; specifically, the connections among children’s and adolescents’ health, psychosocial development, and educational trajectories and how these connections contribute to population-level inequalities (e.g., race, social class, immigration).

This research has been supported by several current or past grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development as well as from the William T. Grant Scholars Program and the Foundation for Child Development Changing Faces of American Children Scholars Program. Professor Crosnoe has been a member of the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, the Collaborative on the Analysis of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood, and the Institute of Medicine Study Group on Young Adult Health and Safety, and he has won early career awards from the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Research on Human Development, and the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association. He currently is the Deputy Editor of Journal of Marriage and Family and sits on the Governing Council of Society for Research in Child Development and the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Professor Crosnoe's recently co-authored "Debating Early Child Care: The Relationship between Developmental Science and the Media" (2015, with Tama Leventhal), "Healthy Learners: A Whole Child Approach to Disparities in Early Education" (2015, with Claude Bonazzo and Nina Wu), and "Physical Attractiveness and the Accumulation of Social and Human Capital in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Assets and Distractions" (2013, with Rachel Gordon and Xue Wang).

Professor Crosnoe has been Deputy Editor of Journal of Marriage and Family, Chair of the Children and Youth Section of the American Sociological Association, and a member of the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, the Collaborative on the Analysis of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood, and the Institute of Medicine Study Group on Young Adult Health and Safety. Currently, he is the President-Elect of the Society for Research on Adolescence and sits on the Governing Council of Society for Research in Child Development and the Board of the Council on Contemporary Families.