Nationality Australia Name Duncan Watts | Doctoral advisor Steven Strogatz | |
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Born Duncan James Watts
February 20, 1971 (age 53)
Guelph, Ontario ( 1971-02-20 ) Institutions Columbia University
Microsoft Research
Santa Fe Institute
Yahoo! Research
Nuffield College, Oxford Alma mater University of New South Wales
Cornell University (PhD) Thesis The structure and dynamics of small-world systems (1997) Doctoral students Gueorgi Kossinets
Roby Muhamad
Matthew Salganik Known for Watts and Strogatz model
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age Residence New York City, New York, United States Education Cornell University, University of New South Wales Fields Sociology, Network science Books Six Degrees: The Scie, Everything Is Obvious: How Coo, Small Worlds: The Dyna, Six Degrees Proof Similar People Steven Strogatz, Mark Newman, George II of Great Britain | ||
Influence and attention on twitter duncan j watts
Duncan James Watts (born 1971) is a sociologist and principal researcher at Microsoft Research, New York City known for his work on small-world networks.
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Education
Watts received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of New South Wales and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Career
Watts was past external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a former professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is author of the book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us. The six degrees research is based on his 1998 paper with Steven Strogatz in which the two presented a mathematical theory of the small world phenomenon.
Until April 2012, he was a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. Watts joined Microsoft Research in New York City by its opening on May 3, 2012.
Watts describes his research as exploring the "role that network structure plays in determining or constraining system behavior, focusing on a few broad problem areas in social science such as information contagion, financial risk management, and organizational design." More recently he has attracted attention for his modern-day replication of Stanley Milgram's small world experiment using email messages and for his studies of popularity and fads in on-line and other communities.
