The next generation includes Marissa Combs, who is in her second year of sociology graduate studies. Winship made statistics and math approachable, she said, and his class helped students build a “statistical intuition” to prepare them for the problems they might run into when confronting data in the real world.

“As an early stage graduate student and someone who’s interested in quantitative methods, it’s been an invaluable course for me,” said Combs. “Chris works very diligently to make sure that students, no matter what their background is in quantitative training, come into the class feeling empowered to learn more and engage critically with the work.”

Colleague Gary King, the Weatherhead University Professor and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, praised Winship’s contributions in developing new data analysis methods. “We are all his students, in a sense,” he said. “His scholarly works cause us all to think of the world in different ways and to think of how to analyze data in different ways.”

Winship is beloved by students for his personable manner and sympathetic ear, rooted in his upbringing as the child of therapists. The family joke, he said, was that his adolescent rebellion was to become a quantitative sociologist. Math came easily to him from a young age. In graduate school, he did postdoc studies with James Heckman, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000.

Winship’s lecture notes, which he shares with students, are legendary. They offset his moderate dyslexia and help him avoid writing incorrect formulas on the board, he said, chuckling. Some students keep the notes for years. Among them is Anthony Jack, now an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education, who remembers the course as transformative.

“It really changed me,” said Jack, who has held onto Winship’s notes for 13 years. “This is a class that gets you to think about theoretical foundations of social inquiry. It makes you think about the what and the how. It is not just about statistics even though the course is focused on statistics.”

Leading the last class, Winship explained the intricacies of model searches and the problems of data mining, reminding students to be careful when analyzing information. He urged them to resist “torturing” the data because it may not yield, or “confess,” the hoped-for result. When the session was over, as Winship was joined in the classroom by his wife, Nancy, and their dog Chloe, a perky Coton de Tulear, students and visitors applauded.

Asked what he has learned from his students all these years, Winship put it this way: “We all do our best thinking when we think with others. My students have been fantastic people to think with.”