Damon Centola

Damon Centola
Prof. Centola
Born	July 19, 1973, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation	Professor
Institutions	University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Harvard University, Stanford University
Alma mater	Cornell University (Ph.D.) (M.A.), Tufts University (M.A.), Marlboro College (B.A.)
Doctoral advisor	Michael Macy (Sociology)
Fields	Agent based modeling, web-based experiments (Internet experiments), complex contagions, social networks, social epidemiology
Known for	Complex contagions
Website	http://ndg.asc.upenn.edu/

Damon Centola is an Associate Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania,^[1] where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group.^[2] Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at M.I.T. Sloan School of Management (2008-2013).^[3] He was also a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow at Harvard University,^[4] a member of Sci Foo Campers community, and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.^[5]

Centola's research focuses on the study of social networks, social epidemiology, and web-based experiments on diffusion and cultural evolution.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Popular accounts of Damon’s work have appeared in mainstream media publications such as The New York Times,^[11] The Washington Post,^[12] Wired,^[13] TIME,^[14] CBS,^[15] and CNN.^[16] His research has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. He is a series editor for Princeton University Press.^[17]

Centola is the author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions. The book presents over a decade of original research and offers a counterintuitive theory for how social networks influence the spread of behavior. ^[18]

Career

Centola is best known for his work on complex contagions, which was the topic of his Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology, supervised by Michael Macy at Cornell University. After completing his doctorate degree at Cornell, Damon spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Policy at Harvard University. He then joined the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT in 2008.^[19] In 2013, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communications.

Complex Contagions

Centola and Macy found that information and disease spread as “simple contagions,” requiring only one contact for transmission, while behaviors typically spread as “complex contagions,” requiring multiples sources of reinforcement to induce adoption. Centola’s work builds on Granovetter’s work on the strength of weak ties and threshold models of collective behavior, as well as Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz’s work on small world networks. Centola and Macy show that the weak ties and small worlds networks are both very good for spreading simple contagions. However, for complex contagions, weak ties and small worlds can slow diffusion.^[20]

Awards

Damon Centola received the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Award for Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology in 2006, 2009, and 2011,^[21] and was awarded the ASA's 2011 Goodman Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Sociological Methodology.^[22] He was a developer of the NetLogo agent based modeling environment,^[23] and was awarded a U.S. Patent for inventing a method to promote diffusion in online networks.^[24]

References

External links

• GoogleScholar