Hugh Gladwin is the director of the Institute for Public Opinion Research and Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Florida International University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1970.

His major area of research is the application of survey research and GIS tools to understand large urban settings of high cultural and demographic diversity. Within that framework, a particular interest is to better model the interactions between the human population and natural systems such as the South Florida ecosystem and extreme natural events like hurricanes. For this latter area, integrating human decision models with GIS are a major task. He is a co-editor (with Walter Gillis Peacock and Betty Morrow) and contributor to the book Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Sociology of Disaster and author of many publications and presentations on disaster mitigation, public health, and public opinion.