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Berkeley's David Collier wins Johan Skytte Prize in political science

By Public Affairs

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Uppsala University’s Johan Skytte Prize, described by the Swedish institution as “one of the greatest and most prestigious awards in political science,” has been awarded to UC Berkeley professor David Collier for “his contributions to concept development in political science and the development of methods for qualitative analysis.”

Collier

Collier

In announcing the prize, Uppsala praised Collier’s empirical research on Latin America, calling him “a political scientist of great importance to contemporary research.”

“There is humility and a refreshing lack of self-centering that appears in Collier’s great co-authored works,” said Li Bennich-Björkman, Johan Skytte professor in eloquence and political science and chair of the award committee.

Collier, who joined the Berkeley faculty in 1978, has served as chair of the political science department and the Center for Latin American Studies, and was founding co-director of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Latin American Studies. He has been a Guggenheim fellow, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Johan Skytte Prize — which comes with 500,000 Swedish krona, or about $75,000 in U.S. currency — will be awarded for the 20th consecutive year at a ceremony in Uppsala, Sweden, in September.