Ronald Breiger

Ronald Breiger is an American sociologist and a Regents' Professor, a professor of sociology and (by courtesy) government and public policy, and an affiliate of the interdisciplinary graduate program in statistics at the University of Arizona. Prior to coming to Arizona he served on the faculties of Harvard University (assistant to associate professor) and Cornell University (professor to Goldwin Smith Professor of Sociology). He is well cited in the fields of social networks, stratification, mathematical models, organizational sociology and cultural sociology and was editor of the influential academic journal Social Networks from 1998 to 2006. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Georg Simmel Distinguished Career Award of the International Network for Social Network Analysis.

Ronald Breiger grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He received his AB Summa cum Laude at Brandeis University in 1970 with a thesis entitled: Value Conceptions in Early American Sociology. In 1975 he received a PhD from Harvard University. His dissertation was on "Dual and Multiple Networks of Social Structure". His committee consisted of Harrison White(chair), Mark Granovetter and Thomas F. Pettigrew.

In 1985-86, he was a fellow of the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and he was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar for 1987-88. He is also a national affiliate of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Breiger's primary contributions have been to the field of social network analysis. The most widely cited are, with co-authors Harrison White and Scott A. Boorman, "Social Structure from Multiple Networks. I. Blockmodels of Roles and Positions" published in 1976. and "The duality of persons and groups" published in 1974.

Beginning in 2000, Breiger devoted considerable attention to elucidating the mutual implications of social network analysis and the sociology of culture. In recent years, he and colleagues have turned regression analysis and many of its generalizations "inside out" by showing how regression modeling rests on a dual network of profile similarity among the cases.

Breiger has played in important role in applying network analytic techniques to the study of terrorism. For instance, in the summer of 2002, Breiger chaired a workshop on dynamic social network and analysis for the Office of Naval Research asked the Committee on Human Factors National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Research Affiliate with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, one of the Department of Homeland Security Centers of Excellence.

In 2005 he received the Georg Simmel Distinguished Career Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis(INSNA), the award is given annually to the keynote speaker at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference, the annual conference of the INSNA. In 2009-10 he served as elected chair of the Section on Mathematical Sociology of the American Sociological Association.