Melvin L. Kohn studied at Deep Springs Junior College and Cornell University, receiving his B.A. (with distinction in psychology and in general studies) from Cornell in 1948 and his Ph.D. (in sociology, with minors in social psychology and industrial relations) in 1952. He did research in the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health from 1952 to 1985, serving as Chief of that Laboratory from 1960 on. He left NIMH to come to Hopkins as Professor of Sociology in 1985.

Kohn's research for most of his career has been in the field of social structure and personality. In recent years, this work has been almost entirely cross-nationally comparative and collaborative – initially comparing Washington, D.C. to Torino, Italy, later and much more intensively, comparing the United States to then-socialist Poland and to Japan. His most recent research has focused on social structure and personality under conditions of radical social change – beginning with a comparative study of Poland and Ukraine during the early stages of their transition from socialism to nascent capitalism, currently comparing transitional China to Poland and Ukraine. All of these studies have been done in collaboration with sociologists in those countries.

His principal books in English are Class and Conformity: A Study in Values (1969); Work and Personality: An Inquiry into the Impact of Social Stratification (1983, co-authored with Carmi Schooler); Social Structure and Self-Direction: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Poland (1990, co- authored with Kazimierz M. Slomczynski); and Change and Stability: A Cross-National Analysis of Social Structure and Personality (2006). One or more of these books and several collections of his published articles have been translated into, and published in, Chinese, German, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian. Several of his articles have also been translated into these and other languages, including Danish, French, Japanese, Russian, and Swedish. Kohn has also edited or co-edited two books, Cross-National Research in Sociology (1989), and Power and Social Structure (1999, co-edited with Alexandra Jasinska-Kania and Kazimierz S»omczynski).

Kohn is a past-President of the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society, and the Sociological Research Association, and a former member of the Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association. He is an honorary foreign member of the Polish Sociological Association, and is or has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been a visiting fellow (or the equivalent thereof) of the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway, of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, and of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science.

He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, was for some years a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max-Planck Institut für Bildungsforschung in Berlin, and, in the final years of the Soviet Union, was a member of the US-USSR Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Learned Societies and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Kohn is the recipient of the Ernest W. Burgess Award of the National Council on Family Relations, the Cooley-Mead Award of the Section on Social Psychology of the American Sociological Association, the Merit Award of the Eastern Sociological Association, and the Stuart A. Rice Award of the District of Columbia Sociological Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by The National University of “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (Ukraine) in 2008. The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, together with the Polish Sociological Association, held an International Symposium on “Social Structure and Personality under Conditions of Stability and Change: Research of Melvin L. Kohn and his Collaborators,” in Warsaw on December 16, 2008.