Lawrence Wu is currently Professor of Sociology, and Director of Population Center at New York University. He is a noted authority on nonmarital fertility in the United States. He is on the faculty of New York University and has previously been on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton University. His research has received funding from NICHD, NSF, ASPE, and the William T. Grant Foundation.

Wu received an A.B. in Sociology and Applied Mathematics from Harvard 1980 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford in 1987.