Robert B. Smith (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1971) taught political sociology, research methods, and theory development at the University of California, Santa Barbara.nbsp; His research there focused on the social consequences of war, generalizations of path analysis, and computer simulations of social processes.nbsp; Since then, he has worked extensively in applied research.nbsp; His publications include articles on political and social processes, and on multilevel models bearing on human development.nbsp; He was the primary editor of the three volumes of the A Handbook of Social Science Methods, which link qualitative and quantitative methods, and he is the author of Cumulative Social… Inquiry: Transforming Novelty into Innovation.nbsp; His recent research at the Cambridge-MIT Institute assesses student exchange programs and pedagogical experiments.nbsp; As senior statistician he worked on software for randomized trials, exact statistics, and Bayesian simulations at Cytel Inc., and is an advisory editor of Quality & Quantity.nbsp; He was a Fulbright lecturer in structural sociology at Ghent University, Belgium, and he has served as president of the Boston chapter of the American Statistical Association.nbsp; He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he directs his social structural research.