Speakers

Dr. Michelle Birkett

Michelle Birkett is faculty in the Department of Medical Social Sciences and directs the CONNECT Complex Systems and Health Disparities Research Program within the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Dr. Birkett’s research uses network and quantitative methodologies to understand the social contextual influence of stigma on the health and wellbeing of marginalized populations, and in particular, sexual and gender minority youth. This work is influenced by a multilevel perspective of health that considers direct and indirect influences of multiple levels of the social and physical environment. This multilevel approach to understanding health underlies her interest in network data and her commitment to conducting research that leads to social change at multiple levels of society to eliminate health disparities.

Dr. Damon Centola (he/his/him)

Damon Centola is the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Network Dynamics Group and is senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. He is a leading expert on social networks and behavior change. His awards including the American Sociological Association’s Award for Mathematical Sociology in 2006, 2009, and 2011, the James Coleman Award in 2017 and the Harrison White Award for Outstanding Scholarly Book in 2019. His work is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the Templeton Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation. Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, TIME, The Atlantic, Scientific American and CNN. He was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks. He is a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and a series editor for Princeton University Press. His books include How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions (2018), and Change: How to Make Big Things Happen (2021).

Dr. Jennifer Cross

Jeni Cross, PhD, is the Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. Dr. Cross has been conducting community-engaged research for her entire career, working with community agencies to develop effective programs and design transformational change. Her areas of expertise include behavior change, community development, inter-agency collaboration, place attachment and community connection, professional social networks, and urban sustainability. Using the tools of social science to help solve problems, she has been published in 15 different fields of science from sociology to civil engineering to nursing to ecology. She is the co-chair of the Environmental Health Matters Initiative (EHMI), a committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The EHMI address complex environmental problems as an interconnected, multi-sectoral, multi-faceted system, with a focus on the cumulative impacts from environmental stressors. 
 
Dr. Cross is also the Director of the team science core at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. She translates the insights from social science into practice with large science teams. At the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Dr. Cross and her team provide coaching, team interventions, team assessment and team science training to large teams and institutes across the United States and Europe. Their assessments of team growth and development blend existing data with original social data to track team development over time and to design custom interventions to advance team growth. She has also created a series of experiential workshops to build team competencies among early career researchers and senior team leaders.

Dr. Kayla de la Haye (she/her)

Kayla de la Haye is a scientist at the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research, where she directs the Institute for Food System Equity. She works to promote health and prevent disease by applying social network analysis and systems science to key public health issues. Her current observational and intervention research focuses on family and community social networks, and broader social determinants of health, to promote healthy eating, nutrition security, and prevent chronic disease. It also explores the role of social networks in group problem solving in families, teams, and coalitions. Dr. de la Haye currently serves as Vice President of the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA), and in 2018, she received the INSNA Freeman Award for significant contributions to the study of social structure. She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Dr. Kayo Fujimoto (she)

Kayo Fujimoto, Ph.D., specializes in social network methods and their application, primarily focusing on population health research. Fujimoto’s research examines the impact of social networks on health behaviors, information diffusion, disease prevention, and transmission, with a focus on HIV/STIs and health disparities. Currently, Fujimoto is working on the application of advanced technologies, including graph-based deep learning and blockchain, for a human-centered approach to coordinating care and social services, with the goal of increasing health equity and improving community health.

Dr. Matthew Jackson (he/him)

Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford, and received his BA from Princeton University in 1984 and PhD from Stanford in 1988. Jackson’s research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books The Human Network and Social and Economic Networks. He also teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Game Theory Society Fellow, and an Economic Theory Fellow, and has received other honors.

Dr. David Kennedy (he/him)

David Kennedy is a senior social / behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. He was trained as a medical anthropologist and received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Florida. He has conducted research on the intersection of culture, social networks, and health. He is currently developing innovative methods for targeting social network and romantic relationship factors in health interventions. He has also led the development of software for the collection of social network data and for use in social network interventions. He has conducted research on various health topics, including mental health, chronic and infectious illnesses, and the use of substances such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs. He has conducted research with a variety of populations, including people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, American Indian / Alaska Native emerging adults in the United States, newlywed couples, and caregivers of older family members. As a methodologist, Kennedy specializes in personal social network data collection and analysis, the collection and analysis of qualitative data, and in developing innovative research designs that integrate qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Dr. Laura Koehly (she/her/hers)

Dr. Laura Koehly is a Senior Investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health, where she is the chief of the Social and Behavioral Research Branch and heads the Social Network Methods Section. She completed her doctoral studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Quantitative Psychology. Dr. Koehly’s training in psychology and statistics, with an expertise in social network analysis, uniquely positions her team to investigate the role of social context in health. The ongoing programmatic work in her section aims to improve our understanding of the social contextual factors that influence health behaviors and psychological adjustment to inherited disease risk and diagnoses. In so doing, this research can inform tailored approaches that leverage both genomics and social context to improve family members’ health outcomes.

Dr. Christopher McCarty

Christopher McCarty is Associate Dean in the UF College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the UF Bureau of Economic and Business Research. He has over thirty years of experience conducting research in Florida both at the state and local levels and under his direction BEBR has implemented the most comprehensive economic and demographic database on Florida. He is regarded as an expert on the Florida economy and often speaks to groups around the state on that topic. McCarty’s primary research focus is on social network analysis, and more specifically the analysis of personal networks. More recently he has developed a network science program funded through the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. McCarty and his colleagues use networks to understand what drives scientific collaboration and how interventions can be developed to incentivize new collaborations.

Dr. Esteban Moro Egido (he/his)

Esteban Moro is a Professor at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. He was previously a professor and researcher at the Department of Mathematics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Media Lab and the Joint Institute UC3M-Santander on Big Data at UC3M, Spain. Esteban’s work lies in the intersection of big data and computational social science, with particular attention to human dynamics, collective intelligence, social networks, and urban mobility in problems like viral marketing, natural disaster management, or economic segregation in cities. He has received numerous awards for his research and his work appeared in major journals and is regularly covered by media outlets.

Dr. Bernice Pescosolido (she/her)

Bernice Pescosolido is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and Founding Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research (ICMHSR) and the new Irsay Institute that targets research in the sociomedical sciences. She is an elected member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Trained as a medical sociologist at Yale, her research focuses on connectedness and suicide, the stigma of mental illness and addiction, international issues in health and health care, and social networked pathways to treatment. Her concerns have spanned local, national and international questions and problems, primarily targeting mental illness. In particular, she is concerned with how social and organizational networks facilitate or frustrate people’s responses to problems.

Pescosolido’s research, supported by several NIH Institutes, NSF and private philanthropy, has been published broadly across scientific and policy journals. She has received several career, teaching, and mentoring awards (e.g., NARSAD’s Distinguished Investigator Award, the Taube Award from the American Public Health Association, the Reeder Award from the American Sociological Association, Yale’s Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, and the 2023 Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis). Recently, her paper on breaking through data and theory stalemates in suicide research (PNAS 2020, with Lee and Kafadar), was named a Cozzarelli Prize Finalist. She is currently involved as a scientific advisor/organizer for several stigma reduction efforts (e.g., National Football League, World Psychiatric Association, Bring Change to Mind).

Dr. Eric Rice (he/him)

Eric Rice is a Professor at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the director of the USC Center for AI in Society, a joint venture between the schools of social work and engineering at USC. Rice received a BA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the USC faculty in 2009. He specializes in social network science and theory, as well as community-based research. His primary focus is on youth experiencing homelessness and how issues of social network influence may affect risk-taking behaviors and resilience. For several years he has been working with colleagues in computer science to merge social work science and AI, seeking novel solutions to major social problems such as homelessness and HIV. Rice is the author of more than 180 peer-reviewed articles in such publications as the American Journal of Public Health, AIDS and Behavior, the Journal of Adolescent Health, Pediatrics, Child Development, and the Journal of the Society for Social Work Research. He is the recipient of grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the California HIV/AIDS Research Program, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Army Research Office and other agencies. In 2021 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Society for Social Work Research. Since 2002, he has worked closely with homeless youth providers in Los Angeles and many other communities across the country. He is the creator of the TAY Triage Tool—to identify high-risk homeless youth for prioritizing them for supportive housing—which was incorporated into Orgcode’s Next Step Tool for homeless youth. Rice’s primary collaborators in Los Angeles are the Los Angeles Housing Service Authority, the United Way’s Home for Good, the LA LGBT Center, My Friend’s Place and Safe Place for Youth.

Dr. Michael Siciliano (he/him)

Michael D. Siciliano is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy, Management, and Analytics at the University of Illinois Chicago and Co-Director of the Networks & Governance Lab. Michael studies how humans and organizations cooperate to address transboundary problems. His work explores the cognitive, social, and institutional factors influencing the formation and performance of collaborative networks. He is co-editor of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and former chair of the American Society for Public Administration’s Section for Complexity and Network Studies.

Dr. Thomas Valente (he/him)

Dr. Valente is a Professor in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. His research uses social network analysis, health communication, and mathematical models to implement and evaluate health promotion programs. He is currently working on specifications for network models of diffusion and contagion with the R package NetdiffuseR; and is also well-known for his work developing network models of program implementation and network interventions. He has authored three book and over 250 articles and chapters; is co-editor (with Ulrik Brandes) of Social Networks; and on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives. Valente received the Simmel Award from INSNA and the Rogers award from APHA; as well as mentoring awards at USC and JHU.

Dr. Danielle Varda (she/her)

Dr. Danielle Varda is the CEO and Founder of Visible Network Labs and the developer of the PARTNER Platform. Before embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, Danielle honed her expertise as a Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver for 15 years, and as a Policy Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Her academic and professional pursuits have always been driven by a passion for leveraging data, science, and technology to empower communities. She has published extensively on the link between social connectedness and outcomes, and works with communities across the world to implement network science processes into the workflow for social impact. With her team of data scientists, developers, product specialists, and partnership builders, VNL has become a social enterprise at the forefront of strengthening connections at both individual and community levels, aiming for profound social, economic, health, and wellness outcomes.

Dr. Alessandro Vespignani (he/his)

Dr. Vespignani is a Sternberg Family Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University where he is the founding director of the Northeastern Network Science Institute. Prof. Vespignani received his undergraduate degree and Ph.D., both in physics, from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He completed his postdoctoral research at Yale University and Leiden University. Prof. Vespignani worked at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (UNESCO) in Trieste and at the University of Paris-Sud in France as a member of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). From 2004 to 2011, Vespignani was J.H.Rudy Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and the founding Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and Associate Director of the Pervasive Technology Institute. Vespignani is elected fellow of the American Physical Society, Lifetime Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), member of the Academy of Europe, and fellow of the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University. Recently Vespignani’s research activity focuses on the data-driven computational modeling of epidemic and spreading phenomena and the study of biological, social and technological networks.