Elaine Howard Ecklund

Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and a professor of sociology at Rice University, as well as director of Rice University’s Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance. Theoretically, her sociological work explores how individuals and small groups bring changes to larger institutions that constrain them. Substantively, her work explores this topic in relationship to religion and science, gender, race, and immigration in different national contexts.

Ecklund is the author of seven books, over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, and numerous op-eds. She has received over 10 million dollars in grants and awards, including those from the Templeton Religion Trust, Lilly Endowment, Inc., Templeton World Charity Foundation, National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation. Her research has been covered over 5,000 times in national and international news media, including USA Today, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

She received a Ph.D. in 2004 from Cornell University, where she was the recipient of the Class of 2004 Graduate Student Baccalaureate Award for Academic Excellence and Community Service. In 2013, Ecklund was winner of the Charles O. Duncan Award for outstanding research and teaching achievement at Rice University. In 2018, she gave the Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. Ecklund has previously served as chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on the Sociology of Religion and as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Over the past several years, Ecklund’s research has explored how scientists in different nations understand religion, ethics, and gender. Ecklund teaches classes at the graduate and undergraduate level on immigration, sociology of science, classical sociological theory, research methods, and religion in public life.