Steven Ruggles

Steven Ruggles (born May 8, 1955 - New Haven, Conn.) is Regents Professor of History and Population Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the director of the IPUMS Center for Data Integration. He is best known as the creator of IPUMS, the world's largest population database. IPUMS provides information about two billion people residing in 159 countries between 1703 and the present, including every respondent to the surviving U.S. censuses of 1790 to 1950. He served as founding director of the Minnesota Population Center from 2000 to 2016 and the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation from 2016 to 2023. He served as the 2015 President of the Population Association of America, the first historian to hold the position. He also served as President of the Association of Population Centers (2017–2018) and President of the Social Science History Association (2018–2019). He has been active on many national advisory and study committees, including the Census Bureau Scientific Advisory Committee; the National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Advisory Committee; the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure; and the National Academy of Sciences Board on Research Data and Information.

Ruggles received a Ph.D. in historical demography from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He has published extensively on historical demography, focusing especially on long-run changes in multi-generational families, single parenthood, divorce, and marriage, and on data and methods for population history. His study of the effects of demographic change on family structure won the William J. Goode Book Award from the American Sociological Association and the Allen Sharlin Memorial Award from the Social Science History Association. Ruggles's work on migration censoring in family reconstitution stimulated a debate about biases introduced by the "Ruggles Effect."

In 2003, Ruggles received the Robert J. Lapham Award from the Population Association of America in recognition of lifetime contributions that blend research with the application of demographic knowledge to policy issues, and in 2009 he received the Warren E. Miller Award from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research for meritorious service to the social sciences. In 1995, Ruggles was described as the "King of Quant" by Wired Magazine, and in 2014, he was named “Wonkblog-Certified Data Wizard” by the Washington Post Wonkblog, which noted that losing to Steven Ruggles in Name That Data is kind of like losing to Adele on ''American Idol''. In 2022 Ruggles was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant.

In 1994, Ruggles married Lisa Norling, another historian. They have two daughters. Provided by Wikipedia