Charles B. Nam was born in Lynbrook, New York on March 25, 1926, and currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida. He was a Professor of Sociology for 31 years with one of his most important contributions being the Nam-Powers Index measuring occupational status. Education Charles Nam attended an Army Specialized Training Program at Harvard University in 1944, completed his Bachelor of Arts in Applied Statistics at New York University in 1950 and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for both his Master’s degree in Sociology (1957) as well as his Ph.D (1959). Career Charles Nam began his professional career at the Census Bureau in 1950. For more than three years, he was employed in the International Population Statistics Section, assisting subject matter specialists in the social statistics field. Following his time at the US Bureau of the Census, Charles Nam work for the US Air Force Human Resource Research Institute as an assistant project director on demographic studies of officers and airmen, leaving this position to attend graduate school. While pursuing his masters and PhD he was a research assistant on various demographic research projects at the University of North Carolina Institute for Research in Social Science, returning to the Census (1957) prior to completing his doctorate in sociology (1960). At the US Bureau of the Census (1957–1964) Nam was chief of the Education Statistics Section (1957–1961), helping to plan the 1960 census, preparing Current Population reports, and helping to train foreign students in census techniques. Later (1962–1964), Nam was the Chief of the Education and Social Stratification Branch where he was responsible for education, stratification and other social data. During this time he also was the project director for a study matching death certificates to census records. Leaving the US Bureau of the Census in 1964, Nam began his 31-year academic career at Florida State University. During the course of his academic career, he chaired the Department of Sociology and founded the Population and Manpower Research Center (which later became the Center for the Study of Population and even later became the Center for Demography and Population Health). He directed the center for its first 14 years and was Associate Center Director again for the early 1990s. Nam is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books. He wrote Education of the American Population with John Folger in 1967, and The Socioeconomic Approach to Status