Q: Is there an issue that has shaped all of your work?
I am a network scientist. When I look at the world, I see patterns of social interaction and social networks. I’ve spent the first two decades of my career documenting social epidemics using advanced, computational analytics.
Contagion processes infectious diseases, for example are often modeled through social networks. I study phenomena that spread not through a biological mechanism but through social contagion.
Whether it’s the rapid increase in autism cases, mental health medication use, or opioid use disorder, these phenomena, despite having radically different contexts, exhibit very similar patterns a rapid increase in cases and a huge amount of geographic variation. Those two things are the signature of social epidemics. My work has been trying to understand how these rapid increases arise from individual-level behavior.