Charles Ragin, sociology Chancellor’s Professor, is the 2014 recipient of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Award. The award is given by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology in recognition of career contributions to sociological methodology.

Ragin came to UCI in 2012 as a Chancellor's Professor, a title reserved for faculty members who have demonstrated exceptional academic merit and promise for ongoing scholarly achievement. His primary contributions are methodological; he develops and uses set-theoretic methods to compare cases as configurations of conditions and outcomes. His methods for qualitative comparative and fuzzy set analyses have been widely adopted in sociology and political science, and his approaches are making inroads in medicine, engineering, and organizational studies.

In addition to his methodological work, Ragin focuses on social inequality, the welfare state, and ethnic political mobilization. He is the author of eight books and more than 150 articles in research journals and edited books, and he has developed several software packages for data analysis. He is a past recipient of the International Social Science Council Stein Rokkan Prize and the Policy Studies Organization Donald Campbell Award for Methodological Innovation, and he received honorable mention for the American Sociological Association Barrington Moore, Jr. Award. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation and Kenan Foundation.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCI, Ragin held appointments at Indiana University, Bloomington, Northwestern University, the University of Oslo in Norway, and most recently, the University of Arizona, where he was a political science and sociology professor.