Ronald Inglehart is the Lowenstein Professor of Political Science and a research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is also co-director of the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia. Inglehart helped found the Euro-Barometer surveys and directs the World Values Survey, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 97 countries containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. His research deals with changing belief systems and their impact on social and political change.

He has been a visiting professor or visiting scholar in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Nigeria and New Zealand, and has served as a consultant to the U.S. State Department and the European Union. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Social and Political Science and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and will receive an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels in May 2010.