Michael L. Smith, Ph.D.

I am a senior researcher at two institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences: Intitute of Sociology and CERGE-EI. I am also a lecturer at the University of Washington, Seattle. From 2014-2018, I was involved in the Center of Excellence project “Dynamics of Change in Czech Society,” where I co-led the research team developing the Czech Household Panel Study. I received B.A. degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle (1998), M.A. from Boston College (2000), and my PhD in Political Science (2008) from the New School for Social Research in New York, where I also received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Best Dissertation. During my studies I was a David L. Boren Fellow, a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, an IREX fellow, and a short-term scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I led the team creating www.politickefinance.cz, the database of Czech political party financing. I am dedicated to both basic and applied research, and I am focused on helping my institutions acquire research grants necessary for implementing large-scale social surveys and for funding research into fundamental questions of social and economic inequality in the Czech Republic and around the world.