Dr. R. Saylor Breckenridge joined the faculty of Wake Forest University in the Fall of 2001 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007. He has earned degrees in both Sociology and Mathematics and his interests are broadly oriented toward studying competition/cooperation and success/failure from economic, organizational, and cultural sociological perspectives. In addition to Sociology, Dr. Breckenridge is affiliated with Wake Forest University’s interdisciplinary Film Studies Program and its Master of Arts in Sustainability Program in the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability.

Dr. Breckenridge has served two tours of duty at the National Science Foundation, a primary source of federal support for basic science research at colleges and universities in the United States. He was the Director of the Sociology Program from 2012 to 2014. During this time, he also served as a co-Program Director of Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research in the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences and in Education and Human Resources. He previously served as the Director of the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program from 2008 to 2009.

He has also worked extensively in international contexts, serving as a Visiting Associate Professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirikata City, Japan in 2007 and directing three student-oriented service-learning trips in Vietnam between 2005 and 2007.

Dr. Breckenridge has published in research in journals such as Social Forces, Research in the Sociology of Work, Sociology of Sport, and the Review of Social Policy Research, among other venues. He has a history of both internal and external funding for his work. He regularly teaches courses on statistics, research methods, business and society, and the sociology of film.