He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in technology and social change, language death, and social network analysis. His work in network analysis includes helping to develop the network scale-up method for estimating the size of uncountable populations. Bernard has done research or taught at universities in the U. S., Mexico, Greece, Japan and Germany. He is former editor of Human Organization and the American Anthropologist and is the founder and editor of the journal Field Methods. Bernard’s books include “Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches”, “Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches” with Gery Ryan, and “Native Ethnography” with Jesus Salinas Pedraza. Bernard was the 2003 recipient of the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.