Professor Philip Smith has taken over from Richard Breen as Chair of the Department of Sociology. His three-year term began on July 1. Richard has returned to Oxford University. Smith did his undergraduate work in Edinburgh and earned his PhD at UCLA. He then worked at the University of Queensland, Australia, for ten years before coming to Yale in 2003. Although best known as a contributor to the Yale Strong Program in cultural sociology he is an unusually diverse sociologist who has also published and supervised in a variety of genres from ethnography to quantitative sociology to pure theory. Smith said: “I feel this panoramic background is really going to help when it comes to listening and then responding to the varied needs of the faculty and students in our department. Right now, though, our intense focus is on building our quantitative program that studies social inequality. With several positions approved by the university and currently being advertised I believe we are lined up for some exciting changes.”