Members
Sanjeev Goyal
is a Visiting Professor of Economics at NYUAD for the year 2021-2022. He is also Professor of Economics and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. He was born and received his early education in India (BA, Delhi; MBA, IIM Ahmedabad). He did his doctoral work in the United States (PhD, Cornell). He has previously held appointments at Erasmus, London, and Essex universities. Sanjeev Goyal pioneered and remains a leading international scholar in the study of networks. His book Connections: an introduction to the economics of networks was published by Princeton University Press in 2007; a new book titled Principles of Networks is to be published by MIT Press in 2022. Sanjeev Goyal is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He was the founding Director of the Cambridge-INET Institute (2012-2014) and has been Chair of the Cambridge Economics Faculty (2014-2018).
is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Social Science Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research is in development economics, with a topical focus on firms and labor markets. Much of her work has involved field experiments and/or original data collection in Africa. Her recent networks-focused research has touched on topics such as technology diffusion between small firm owners, informal sector firm boundaries, and measurement.
is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi with affiliations in the Department of Politics at New York University, the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP), and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). His research interests leverage cutting-edge methods in computer science and causal inference to answer substantive questions about public opinion, political institutions, and elite behavior. He also produces open-source tools to help researchers work more efficiently. He is committed to research transparency and open science.
is a sociologist whose research and teaching interests include economic sociology, organizations, sociology of culture and art, entrepreneurship, social networks, and creative industries. His current research examines transnational status dynamics and organizational cognition between local and global markets, concentrating on fields that experience a rapid environmental shift. Lee's works have been published in Poetics (Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media, and the Arts) and as book chapters. His research has been supported through Buffett Institute for International Studies and recognized and invited to several conferences and colloquiums, including ASA, AOM, EGOS, ACEI, University of Alberta, University of Amsterdam, University of Edinburgh, and HEC Paris.
is an assistant professor at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi in Social Research and Public Policy. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and also holds an MS in Mathematical Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest. She has been visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business, and at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Her work focuses on behavioral convergence, through shared cognitive templates used to navigate social situations, as well as social networks through which information is diffused and peer-influence is exerted. In her dissertation she studied the social structural drivers of petitioning for the abolition of the slave trade within communities and nationwide in Britain (1787-1807). Her work appeared in Social Forces, and Sociological Science.
is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Interacting Urban Networks (CITIES). Thomas received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in Spring 2020. His research sits at the intersection of environmental and urban sociology and data science. It seeks to use innovative computational social science methodologies to answer questions about inequalities during global climate change and barriers to advancing policy to promote the transition to a more sustainable future. Thomas's recent work with Drs. Kinga Makov and Bruno Abrahao in CITIES uses mobile phone location data to study the ways daily mobility networks reinforce neighborhood inequalities. Their first paper published in Sociological Science was the first to show that mobility network inequality is stable in normal years, but that cities became increasingly isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This work (covered in the Boston Globe) has important implications for creating more just policies to address the inequalities in cities.
is an Postdoctoral Associate at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Groningen, and also holds an MS in Economics from the University of Valencia. He has been Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School and at the Laboratory of Experimental Economics of the University of Valencia. His work focuses on how differences between individuals impact their network relations, applied to problems of social cohesion and segregation. His work appeared in Games and Economic Behavior, Economics Letter, and Rationality & Society.
Minsu Park
is an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at NYU Abu Dhabi. He received his PhD in Information Science from Cornell University. He has been a Research Fellow at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His research lies at the intersection of Sociology of Culture, Organization Studies, Data Science, and Human-Computer Interaction. He is particularly interested in the production and consumption of culture, social and cultural networks, and the antecedents and consequences of creativity and innovation. As his research inhabits an interdisciplinary nexus between data science and social science, simultaneously drawing on and contributing to both, his work has been published in top-tier computer and information science conferences (e.g., ICWSM) and interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Nature Human Behaviour).
Talal Rahwan
is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Data Science and AI Lab at New York University Abu Dhabi. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2007 from The University of Southampton, UK, where he received the Dean’s award for Early Career Researcher. His Ph.D. thesis earned him the British Computer Society's Distinguished Dissertation Award, which annually recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. thesis in the UK in Computer Science. He was selected by the IEEE Computer Society as one of the ten most promising, young Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers in the world. His work appeared in major academic journals, including Nature Communications, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Machine Intelligence. His research received coverage from international media outlets, including The Boston Globe, WIRED, Scientific American, and Nature Middle East. Dr. Rahwan’s research interests include: Data Science, Computational Social Science, Game Theory, and Artificial Intelligence.
is an Assistant Professor at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi in Social Research and Public Policy. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Mannheim. He has been a visiting PhD student at UC Irvine and a visiting scholar at NYU. His work focuses on on a wide range of topics related to the labor market, occupations, migration, gender, and inequality. His studies deal with the influence of atypical work arrangements, technological advancements, various forms of job mobility and female-friendly policies. His current projects focus international trade relations as well as firm networks and their impact on individual career trajectories. Among other outlets, his work appeared in Social Forces, European Sociological Review, ILR Review and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
Anahit Sargsyan
Anahit Sargsyan is an instructor supporting the Social Research and Public Policy program at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi. She received her Master of Engineering from American University of Armenia. After graduation, she joined the Computer Science Department at Masdar Institute as a visiting scholar. Her work lies in the intersection of Computational Social Science, Data Science and AI. Her most recent projects include the analysis of the interpretability and identification of targeted indicators of academic success, and the study of football teams’ evolution, using machine learning and computational techniques.
Marcin Waniek is a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Science division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Warsaw, Poland. It earned him the Polish Artificial Intelligence Society Award for the Best Ph.D. Dissertation in Artificial Intelligence in 2017. His research interests lie in social network analysis, graph theory, computational complexity theory, artificial intelligence, and game theory.
Mustafa Yavas
is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Division of Social Science. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Yale University and also holds an M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering from Bogazici University. His research focuses on work & occupations, class & culture, inequality, social movements, and social networks. He uses both qualitative and computational methods including in-depth interviews, social network analysis, computational text analysis, and agent-based modeling. His previous research focused on various boundary processes in social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, and collective identity formation in social movements. Building on the insights from these studies, he is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled “White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Middle Class in Turkey,” and a couple of articles, in which he explores the intertwined processes of globalization and class formation, focusing on the quality of work life experience of professional-managerial employees of prestigious transnational corporations. His other current project studies the role of media in the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary Turkey and beyond by combining computational text analysis with social networks and aims to map the field of political opinion and its change over time.
Alumni
Moses is currently a Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the Science Division at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is also in the Faculty of Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Data Science Program and Affiliated Faculty at the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) at Northwestern University. He was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Patras in Greece (from 1998 until September 2017, when he retired). Previously he was Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Democritus University of Thrace in Xanthi, Greece (1982-1998). In addition he was Visiting Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of California Irvine (1990-1991). His PhD is from the Johns Hopkins University (1978) in Baltimore. His undergraduate studies were at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, from where he graduated with a Diploma in Chemical Engineering (1973). His research interests and publications are on dynamical systems, social network analysis, social media data analysis, digital humanities and computational social science. Boudourides was recently awarded a Robert K Merton Visiting Research Fellowship from the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University in Sweden.
is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. His work examines how social networks influence political outcomes in developing countries, with a regional focus on North and Sub-Saharan Africa. His research interests include corruption, as well as political communication technologies.
is an assistant professor of sociology in the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi. During the 2017-18 academic year, he is a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. His research focuses on how interpersonal social relationships shape broad social dynamics, such as discourses of radicalism, insurgent movements, and labor migration. Current projects employ computational textual analysis, stochastic actor-oriented models, and networked experiments.
is Postdoctoral Associate at the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been Visiting Scholar at University of Bordeaux and Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford University. His work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. The role of social networks on modern economic growth, the political dynamics of State formation, and the persistence of inequality are some of the topics that compose his agenda. Currently, he is Secretary of The Colombian Economic History Association and Editor of RePEc Biblio--Economic History.
is a Professor of Politics at NYU New York and NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on voting processes as well as experimental methods. She is the author or co-author of four books and numerous journal articles, which have appeared in noted outlets such as the American Economic Review, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Politics, and Review of Economic Studies.
is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on the politics of service delivery, political accountability, and the role of identity and culture in shaping economic and political outcomes. She is writing a book on the Muslim-Christian education gap in Africa, a region where she has worked and conducted fieldwork in eight countries since 2005. She writes for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and is a participant on radio and television media in Uganda, where she previously worked as a reporter. She holds a PhD in Political science and BA in Human Biology from Stanford University.