Ronald Breiger

Dr. Ronald Breiger is a Regents Professor and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, where he also holds affiliations with the Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics, the Inter- disciplinary Program in Statistics & Data Science, and the School of Government and Public Policy. Breiger (PhD Harvard, 1975) was a faculty member at  Harvard University (Assistant to Associate Professor) and Cornell University (Professor to Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology) before coming to the University of Arizona in 2000.

Named a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a Fulbright Senior Scholar, Breiger is a recipient of the Simmel Award of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, and in 2018 he received the James S. Coleman Distinguished Career Achievement Award given by the American Sociological Association Section on Mathematical Sociology. With Linton Freeman, he has served as Editor of the journal Social Networks (1998-2006), and he was Editor for Social and Political Science of the journal Network Science (2016-19). He currently serves as an Academic Editor of PLoS ONE and on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and the journal Poetics. Breiger chaired a 2002 National Academy of Sciences workshop on dynamic social network modeling and analysis, which focused on contributions of that area to national needs. Breiger works in the areas of social networks, stratification, math models, theory, and measurement issues in cultural and institutional analysis. He is fascinated by the prospects for encouraging closer intellectual relations between the sociology of culture, cultural studies, social network analysis, and formal models of classification and social meaning.