Duncan J. Watts
| Duncan Watts | |
|---|---|
Watts presenting at iCitizen 2008
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| Born | Duncan James Watts February 20, 1971 Guelph, Ontario |
| Residence | New York City |
| Nationality | Australia |
| Fields | Sociology, network science |
| 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 advisor | Steven Strogatz |
| Doctoral students | Gueorgi Kossinets Roby Muhamad Matthew Salganik |
| Known for |
Watts and Strogatz model Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age |
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Website research |
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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.
Watts received a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of New South Wales and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
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.
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