Ramina Sotoudeh

Ramina Sotoudeh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology with a secondary appointment in Statistics & Data Science. Her research has two separate streams: examining how genes and social environments interact to shape individual outcomes, and understanding how people organize their attitudes about complex social issues.

While different in substantive focus, these lines of research share a theoretical interest in the role that culture, institutions, and social networks play in shaping how individual attributes and attitudes relate to social outcomes. Because genes, culture, and social relations are complex and multidimensional, traditional methodologies can struggle to isolate mechanisms and disentangle competing explanations. To address this, she develops and uses novel computational approaches that parse their complexity to uncover patterns and pathways that would otherwise be difficult to detect.

Ramina’s work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, PNAS, Demography, Sociological Methods and Research, among others. Before joining Yale’s sociology department, Ramina was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where she remains an affiliated member. She received her PhD from Princeton University and her Bachelor’s degree from NYU Abu Dhabi

Ramina is on sabbatical for the 2025-26 academic year.