[2] His research focuses on mathematical modeling and statistical methods for genetics and evolution[3] and he is the editor-in-chief of Theoretical Population Biology.

[20] Much of Rosenberg's work has analyzed global patterns of genetic and linguistic variation,[9][21][22][23] including developing software for the analysis and visualization of population ancestry data.

[29][30] His work in coalescent theory has characterized the effects of consanguinity,[31] founder events,[32] and migration[33] on patterns of genetic variation.

And his work in human genetics has investigated the implications of population history for association studies and polygenic scores.

His work includes combinatorial enumeration of phylogenetic trees and coalescent histories,[36][37][38][39] analysis of evolutionary models,[40][41][42] and derivation of mathematical bounds on population-genetic statistics.