David R. Segal is a sociology professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Center for Research on Military Organization.

He earned his Ph.D. in 1967 at the University of Chicago, and after nine years on the faculty at the University of Michigan, he joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1976. During the early years of the volunteer military force, Segal directed the sociological research program at the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, where he was responsible for studies of race and ethnic relations, alcohol and drug abuse, morale and motivation, gender integration, and comparative research on military organization.

Segal is currently working on four major projects. One concerns the attitudes of youth toward the military and youth in the military, using a data set on high school seniors and their post-graduation trajectories from 1975 to the present. A second deals with American participation in multinational peacekeeping operations, focusing primarily on the Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai over the past two decades. The third deals with changes in the nature of the military profession from the perspective of the new institutionalism. A current focus is professional closure and the exclusion of sexual minorities from the military. The last project is a study of the demography of the American military that will ultimately be published as an issue of Population Bulletin.