A member of the Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) faculty since 1981, Dan Chambliss earned Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University; in 1982 his doctoral thesis received the American Sociological Association’s prize for the best recent dissertation on medical sociology. His research interests are higher education, formal organizations, social psychology and research methods, while he teaches courses from introductory sociology through senior theses, with an emphasis on social theory, social psychology, and phenomenology. Holder of two previous endowed chairs in recognition of undergraduate teaching, in 2005 Chambliss was named the inaugural holder of the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professorship at Hamilton.

He is the winner of the ASA's Theory section prize for his work on organizational excellence in his widely-reprinted 1989 article, “The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers,” and is author of Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, which was named the 1991 Book of the Year by the U.S. Olympic Committee. His 1996 book, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses and the Social Organization of Ethics, won the Eliot Freidson Prize for the best book of the preceding two years in medical sociology from the American Sociological Association. Chambliss is also co-author, with Russell Schutt, of Making Sense of the Social World, a research methods textbook coming out in a fifth edition in 2015, in use at over one hundred colleges and universities in the U.S. and U.K.

Chambliss is author with Christopher Takacs, his former student and now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, of How College Works, published in February 2014 by Harvard University Press. How College Works has been named recipient of the Press's Warren and Virginia Stone Prize as the outstanding book of the year on Education and Society.

From 2002-08, Chambliss served as a Commissioner, then Member of the Executive Committee, of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, overseeing the accreditation of more than 500 colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic region.

Beyond his academic work, Chambliss serves as senior advisor and Research Director for LH&P, a team of consultants serving senior management (C-level) executives in Fortune 50 firms in the US and UK; he specializes in the design and analysis of internal research projects and secondary data.

Raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he now resides in Cazenovia, New York.