Indiana University Network Science Institute

Bio: Yong-Yeol (YY) Ahn is an assistant professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and a co-founder of Janys Analytics. He develops and leverages mathematical and computational methods to study complex systems such as cells, the brain, society, and culture. His recent contribution includes a new framework to identify pervasively overlapping modules in networks, network-based algorithms to predict viral memes, and a new computational approach to study food culture. He is a recipient of several awards including Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University and as a visiting researcher at the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute for three years after earning his PhD in Statistical Physics from KAIST in 2008.

Bio: Mohammad Hasan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University--Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). Before that, he was a Senior Research Scientist at eBay Research Labs, San Jose, CA. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2009. His research interest focuses on developing novel algorithms in data mining, data management, information retrieval, machine learning, social network analysis, and bioinformatics. He won ACM SIGKDD doctoral dissertation award in 2010 and NSF CAREER award in 2012.

Bio: I am a fan of Network neuroscience, published to connectome paper during my PhD study. I would like to learn more about network neuroscience and how complex brain networks could be analyzed in patients with brain diseases.

Bio: Liana G. Apostolova, MD, MSc, FAAN joined the IU School of Medicine as the Barbara and Peer Baekgaard Professor in Neurology, Radiology, Medical and Molecular Genetics at in June of 2015. She graduated Summa cum Laude from the Medical University, Sofia, Bulgaria in 1998, and completed Neurology residency training at University of Iowa and Dementia fellowship at UCLA. Dr. Apostolova is a prolific researcher with over 60 original peer-reviewed publications. Her research focuses on the early symptomatic and presymptomatic stages of Alzheimer's Disease and on the development and validation of sensitive imaging and genetic biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease and other dementing disorders. She is the Founding Director of the UCLA-Easton Neuroimaging Laboratory. Dr. Apostolova is former recipient of the highly prestigious K23 Beeson Career Development Award as well as several grants form the NIH, private foundations and industry. She was awarded the 2010 American Academy of Neurology Research Award in Geriatric Neurology, the 2010 American Federation for Aging Research GE-Healthcare Junior Investigator Award for Excellence in Imaging and Aging Research and the 2007 Turken Research Award. Dr. Apostolova has served as a research mentor to over 50 undergraduate, 16 graduate and 3 post-graduate students, as well as 3 junior faculty researchers to date. She serves as a Senior Associate Editor for the Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Disease Assessment and Monitoring journal and as the Chair of the Neuroimaging Professional Interest Area of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Bio: Matthew Baggetta studies the civic implications of membership organizations. Such groups can be seen as sites where social network ties are formed and reinforced among individuals and as nodes in networks of membership and non-membership organizations. Baggetta is particularly interested in the selection of individuals into and out of membership groups and the possible causal effects of the organizations on the individuals within them.

Bio: Dr. Aniruddha “Rudy” Banerjee, Associate Professor. Department of Geography, Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) . Sabbatical at EHS, UC Berkeley 2013-14. Research Fellow, Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, CA. ¥ Advisor, SmartZIP™ (real estate intelligence startup), SmartZIP.com, Pleasanton, CA ¥ Advisor, Prodigiq™ (Aviation Software Solutions), Prodigiq.com, Thousand Oaks, California His interests are in spatial and computational statistics, spatial econometrics, decision support systems, and applied operations research (environmental and population health).
Rudy Banerjee earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Bengal Engineering College-University of Calcutta India. Migrating to the United States, he earned an MS degree in Urban and Regional Planning and his doctorate in Geography (environmental epidemiology and GISc) from the University of Iowa. He also has a Graduate Certificate in Transportation Studies from that institution. Rudy has applied combinatorial optimization methods using both integer programming and graph theoretic approaches, Bayesian simulation of hierarchical networks and stochastic optimizations to analyze health information and develop space-time models of population health. Founder Startup SkyDOS(TM) -- a last mile dorne delivery ecosystem.

Bio: I serve as SOIC research dean. My own expertise is in physics of varied scales, and current research in distributed graph algorithms. I would like to join IUNI because I believe it is relevant both from the perspective of my administrative role, and potentially my own research.

Bio: Dr. Priscilla Barnes' research interests are in public health systems and services. More specifically, she examines inter-organizational factors that influence the quality of preventative services that disadvantaged populations receive within the U.S. public health system. She used primary and secondary data to create network-inspired visualization maps that illustrate types of partnerships (information sharing, coordination, cooperation, collaboration) that promote delivery of health education and population health management initiatives in local communities.

Bio: Dr. Börner's research focuses on the development of data analysis and visualization techniques for information access, understanding, and management. She is particularly interested in the study of the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines; the analysis and visualization of online activity; and the development of cyberinfrastructures for large scale scientific collaboration and computation. Dr, Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science in the Department of Information and Library Science, School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands. She is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997. She became an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2012.

Bio: I'm an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, School of Public Health & the EEB department. I'm an eco-epidemiologist with a focus on ecology and evolution of infectious diseases. I earned my Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolution at Silwood Park, Imperial College London advised by Prof. Mick Crawley. After a MRC postdoctoral fellowship (2013-2015) at Imperial College, Infectious Diseases Epidemiology Department, I accepted a postdoctoral position at the Odum School of Ecology, UGA, to work with Prof. Pejman Rohani on the ecology & evolution of vaccine preventable childhood diseases (2015-2019).

Bio: Dr. Richard Betzel works in the field of network neuroscience. The scope of his research is broad, but unified by a network-based approach aimed at deepening our understanding of nervous system function. Dr. Betzel's past work includes: 1. Use of multi-layer network models for characterizing the community organization of multi-modal neuroimaging data and its reconfiguration over short time scales. 2. Applications of network control theory to identify putative drivers of brain network dynamics and, more broadly, to better understand what topological properties of brain networks make them theoretically more controllable. 3. Use of neuroanatomically-constrained dynamic models to examine structure-function relationships in brain networks. 4. Development and application of new methods for detecting and characterizing the meso-scale and community structure of functional and structural brain networks. 5. Development of spatially-constrained and generative models of structural brain networks. 6. Use of spatial network modeling to better understand tradeoffs between the brain’s wiring cost and functionally adaptive (but costly) topological features. Though broad, this past work is unified by their use of a network science framework to characterize the structure of a real-world system (nervous systems, in this case) and to deepen our understanding of that system’s function.

Bio: Johan Bollen is associate professor at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He was formerly a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 2005-2009, and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Old Dominion University from 2002 to 2005. He obtained his PhD in Experimental Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2001. He has published more than 75 articles on computational social science, social media analytics, informetrics, and digital libraries. His research has been funded by the NSF, IARPA, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Johan lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and daughter. In his free time he enjoys P90x and DJing in the local Bloomington clubs as DJ Angst (with his colleague E-trash aka Luis Rocha).

Bio: I research social and political networks in Mongol Yuan Dynasty China (appx. 1250-1368 CE), and have been slowly trying to apply social network analysis tools such as Gephi to my work. I am ultimately interested to pin visualized ego networks to administrative geography in order to visualize the relationship of social and political power to location. I am interested to become an affiliate in order to develop my understanding and working knowledge of SNA tools and their applications to my area of inquiry.

Bio: Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia is an assistant professor at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. He is interested in problems originating from the interplay between people and computing systems, in the determinants of information quality in cyberspace, and in how information propagates across social networks, with application to the integrity of information in cyberspace and the trustworthiness and reliability of social computing systems. Prior to joining UMD he was an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida (USF), where he led the Computational Sociodynamics Laboratory. Giovanni was the recipient in 2013 of a mobility fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation and received postdoctoral training at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University Bloomington. He later joined the Indiana University Network Science Institute as an assistant research scientist until 2018. Prior to his postdoc, he was an analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation and a research associate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Lugano, Switzerland and a Laurea degree in Computer Science from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. His work has been covered in major news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Wired, MIT Technology Review, NPR, and CBS News, to cite a few.

Bio: Dr. Kay Connelly is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She is the director of the Proactive Health Informatics group. Dr. Connelly’s research focuses on user acceptance of ubiquitous and mobile computing technologies where there is a delicate balance between such factors as convenience, control and privacy. Dr. Connelly’s most recent work emphasizes health and wellness applications to empower both the ill and the healthy to manage and improve their own health and make healthy choices.

Bio: My research and teaching specialties are at the intersection of digital methodologies and medieval history. I use text mining, spatial history and coding schema to explore conflict in medieval European history, and my in-classroom work makes similar use of these approaches. Prior to returning to the scholarly world, I spent ten years managing Web sites and the technical and creative people responsible for creating those Web sites.

Bio: Dr. Deusner, an art historian of late 19th century and early 20th century European art, practices network-oriented art history, tracking the densely interlocked small-world networks of artists, art collectors, and institutions. Her research also examines the changing historical concept of "network" in the nineteenth century.

Bio: Dr. Dzemidzic is a research faculty in the Departments of Neurology and Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the IU School of Medicine and has been working on neuroimaging, including connectivity, for almost 20 years. Being a nuclear physicist by training, he is familiar with a range of data acquisition, analysis and software techniques applications. Dr. Dzemidzic’s research focus is in the alcohol research with Drs. David Kareken and Karmen Yoder and he also work with Dr. Andrew Saykin in Alzheimer's disease research. In addition, together with Dr. Robert Considine, he has been involved in applying chemosensory probes to neuroimaging of human eating disorders, such as obesity. Finally, Dr. Dzemidzic is very interested in multi-modal imaging and statistical analysis, the research direction he is pursuing in collaboration with Dr. Jarek Harezlak, whose expertise in biostatistics well complements his imaging expertise. He has also been mentoring a number of junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students whose projects are neuroimaging-oriented.

Bio: Dr. Eddens' research focuses on the methodological development of social network methods to more efficiently understand the social epidemiology of health outcomes such as cancer and the effects of networks on the cancer prevention and control and survivorship continuum. Dr. Eddens has expertise in social network methods and analysis, applied health communication, technology development, and community-based research in rural and urban health disparities. Her research and teaching agenda focus on understanding the role of social networks within social determinants of disease onset, health care access, and health outcomes. She investigates ways to use engaging technology to improve network data collection methods and measurement, to build upon the research on social connections conducted by epidemiologists such as Berkman, Syme, and Kawachi. By gathering more rigorous and detailed data on the social ties of individuals and communities, we can expand our understanding of their impact on health, and use these network data to improve the efficacy of intervention strategies to connect the underserved to health services, support, and solutions. Dr. Eddens has co-created two software platforms for collecting social network data, called OpenEddi (2012-2017) and Enso (2017-present), created with the IUNI IT team.

Bio: Alessandro Flammini is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the University of Rome, and received a PhD in Statistical Physics from the International School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy. Before joining Indiana University he held research positions in several institutions, including the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, the Ralph Parson Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Center for Ultra-structural Analysis at University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. Flammini's research interests are mostly in the area of Computational Social Science. He has a long-standing passion for networks, both in theoretical aspects and applicative domains, including rivers, protein interactions, transportation, ecological, and socio-technological. His research is sponsored by ONR, DARPA, NSF and McDonnell Foundation. Dr. Flammini has formerly been the Director of the Undergraduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Bio: Tatiana Foroud is a Professor in the department of Medical and Molecular Genetics as well as Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. She is a statistical geneticist by training. Her research is focused on the identification of genes contributing to common disorders such as Parkinson disease, Alzheimer disease, intracranial aneurysms and psychiatric disorders such as alcoholism. Much of her research focuses on the study of familial forms of disease, which are likely to have a great genetic contribution. She is currently analyzing high dimensional array data and sequence data to identify common and rare genetic variants contributing to disease. Dr. Foroud also leads large sample collection efforts and manages multiple biorepositories banking a variety of sample types. She is the scientific director of the Indiana Biobank and the principal investigator of multiple grants.

Bio: SI received my PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2000 at the Department of Physics of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, working on lattice gauge theories, percolation and phenomenology of heavy-ion collisions. I switched to complexity science in 2004, and from 2005 till 2007 I have been postdoctoral researcher at the School of Informatics and Computing of Indiana University, working in the group of Alessandro Vespignani. From 2007 till 2011 I have been at ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, first as research scientist then as a scientific leader. In 2011 I became Associate Professor in Complex Systems at the School of Science of Aalto University , Finland. I am currently full professor in the Department of Computer Science of Aalto University and Visiting Scholar at the School of Informatics and Computing, where I will be moving permanently to in the summer of 2016.

Bio: Dr. Fulton is a sociologist who uses network analysis to examine how individuals interact within organizations and how organizations interact with one another. As organizations seek to become more diverse—both in their internal composition and external collaborations—his research examines how organizations navigate internal differences and manage external networks. Dr. Fulton’s research within organizations integrates social capital theory and network analysis to examine how a group’s social composition and social interactions interact to influence its outcomes. His research across organizations examines the collaborative partnerships organizations form to provide social services and he analyze how their interorganizational networks influence the types of programs they offer.

Bio: Filomena Garcia is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics of Indiana University. Her main research interests are Industrial Organization and Game Theory. She has been using strategic network theory to understand the emergence of R&D networks and their effects for competition policy.

Bio: Professor Garyfallidis develops state of the art tools that generate tractograms and structural connectivity matrices of the brain. Dr. Garyfallidis holds the position of Assistant Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering (ISE) of Indiana University (IU) School of Informatics and Computing. He is also the founder and lead engineer of Diffusion Imaging in Python (DIPY), currently the largest open source project in the development of diffusion MRI methods. Diffusion MRI is a unique non-invasive MRI technique that is used to study the structural connectivity of the brain. Dr. Garyfallidis has performed research and development at nearly all levels of diffusion MRI analysis. Recently, he started focusing more on the problems of segmentation and registration of tractography. Some of his most known inventions are QuickBundles and Streamline-based Linear Registration (SLR). Prof. Garyfallidis is leading a new lab for Neuroengineering at ISE specializing in the developing of new methods and intelligent algorithms for medical imaging and brain mapping with applications to research, clinic and industry.

Bio: Dr. Gesselman is a social psychologist and a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute. Dr. Gesselman's research examines dating and sexuality of single adults — with an emphasis on technology and health behaviors — and on the psychology, sexuality, and health of romantic couples.

Bio: My research applies mathematical and computational methods to understand the principles of development, homeostasis and disease in living organisms. I teach both these methodologies and dynamic network modeling,

Bio: Dr. Goni is an Adjunct Associate Research Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, an assistant professor in Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University and a former IU Network Science Institute Research Scientist.

Bio: My early career research interests include using artificial intelligence to better understand complex systems surrounding care delivery and peripheral arterial disease (the leading cause of Nontraumatic amputation in the United States). My work has been funded through a K12 Learning health systems grant and joint partnership between the agency for healthcare research and quality and the patient centered outcomes research institute (AHRQ & PCORI). My next phase of projects include creation of a graphical database for PAD patients in Indiana to better understand the contribution of care fragmentation to poor outcomes and healthcare disparities. My current research mentorship team includes faculty from Luddy, SOIC, Regenstrief, and the school of medicine. I seek to engage with faculty across disciplines to find ways of using network analysis/graph theory to improve patient outcomes in complex healthcare delivery systems.

Bio: Harold D. Green, Jr. (Hank) Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist and the Director of Research for the Indiana University Grand Challenge Precision Health Initiative’s Precision Medicine to Population Health (P2P) study, working closely with Dr. Bernice Pescosolido, the PI. He joined IUNI in September from the RAND Corporation’s main campus in Santa Monica, where he was a Senior Behavioral Scientist and founding director of the RAND Methods Center for Applied Network Analysis and Systems Science. Dr. Green uses network analyses to understand diffusion of information/innovation and the social and cultural determinants of health and health behaviors. Aside from his work on P2P he is actively engaged in a new NIMH-funded study that explores the impact of physician networks on prescribing behavior for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV in the United States, using simulations to assess the way networks and possible policy changes will affect physician prescribing behavior. He is also just beginning an NIMH-funded Randomized Intervention Trial that engages HIV+ clients in Uganda as community change agents, using social network analysis theory and methods to help clients target their prevention advocacy efforts to maximize their impact and minimize negative outcomes and personal risks. In a similar vein he collaborates with colleagues at RAND and in Lebanon on a peer-based sexual health education program that uses social activities and peer networks to provide sexual health information to young men who have sex with men in Beirut, taking advantage of safe social spaces and social networks to provide sorely needed information on HIV prevention, testing and treatment. He is also involved in a study of HIV treatment partners in Botswana, using empirical findings to develop better guidelines for choosing effective treatment partners whose goal is improving the health of HIV+ friends and loved ones. He collaborates with colleagues at the University of Nevada, Reno in a study called “Connecting the DOTs”, which explores HIV risk among African American women and how their social networks affect their attitudes towards HIV prevention, testing, and treatment.

Bio: Dr. Harezlak is an Associate Professor interested in brain connectivity. He has been working with groups both at IU and at other US institutions on statistical models to incorporate both structural and functional connectivity in regularized regression models.

Bio: My research interest is in understanding the neural basis of behavior, as it arises from the interaction between the organism’s nervous system, its body, and its environment. We combine connectome graph analysis, neural network simulations, evolutionary algorithms for optimization, taking into account experimental observations, and mathematical analysis, including information theory and dynamical systems theory, to generate and understand complete brain-body-environment models of simple but biologically and cognitively interesting behaviors.

Bio: My research focuses on developing machine learning, data mining and optimization methods to analyze big biomedical data. I'm developing bioinformatics algorithms and tools for early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease by using deep learning, and biological network modeling.

Bio: Director, Health Informatics, Associate Professor, Health Informatics & Nursing and Affiliate Scientist, Regenstrief Institute

Bio: The research in my lab goes from computational neuroscience studies of neurons and neuronal networks modeling animal behaviors to studies in humans affected by neurological disorders, including translational research applications. All research done in my lab is guided by a general principle of connecting neuronal dynamics to behavior. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by the lack of communicative and cognitive abilities. The current clinical diagnostic models have focused almost exclusively on the deficits providing qualitative behavioral treatments to improve the individual’s condition. In collaboration with Rutgers University and members of the Indiana University School of Medicine, we have been thinking about autism in a very different way. Recent technical advances in wearable sensing technology have helped us bridge the gap between observational clinical practices and quantitative objective research outcomes. The instruments we used in our laboratory settings allow motion tracking kinematics for different parts of the body, including the eyes’ minute motions, facial micro-expressions and body micro-movements. To analyze the “big data sets” produced by these recordings we developed new statistical analytics. Our analyses provide novel physiologically biometrics which may be used to characterizing sensory-motor signatures many which occur largely beneath detection of our naked eye capabilities. Our recent results offer new avenues for connecting the cognitive abilities of individuals by quantitatively studying their moment-by-moment natural micro-movements at a millisecond time scales. Synchronization of inhibitory neurons as a possible mechanism for attentional gain modulation. Naturally occurring visual scenes contain large amounts of spatial and temporal information that are transduced into neuronal spike trains along the visual sensory pathway. Human psychophysics indicates that only a small part of that information is attended. We have developed Hodgkin-Huxley neuronal models to analyze data obtained from electrophysiological experiments with nonhuman primates. We have suggested that attentional modulation of the synchrony of local interneuronal networks could potentially account for these observations. We also considered the case when two stimuli are presented simultaneously. The neuronal response is in between those for each stimulus presented separately (stimulus competition) and when one stimulus is attended. The neuronal response gets closer to the response to this stimulus presented alone (biased competition). When the stimulus contrast is varied, several types of gain responses have been found with attention. We introduced a biophysical neural network model of V4, constraining it to reproduce the dynamics observed in the absence of attention. We were able to reproduce some of the detailed neural activity reported experimentally and the stimulus competition. We are exploring the possibility that our model may provide a unified framework for attentional modulation in V4. From neuronal to an hydrodynamic model describing larvae zebra fish rich swimming repertoire. Larval zebrafish (LZF) provide a unique opportunity to study realistic neuronal models since the fish is transparent and most of its neuronal properties are measured. The LZF exhibits a variety of complex undulatory swimming patterns. This repertoire is controlled by the 300 neurons projecting from brain into spinal cord. We developed a segmental oscillator model (using the NEURON program) to investigate this system. By adjusting NMDA strengths and glycinergic synapses produced the generation of oscillation (tail-beat) frequency patterns over the range exhibited experimentally. To describe visually the experimentally observed bending patterns we also developed a biomechanical-hydrodynamic model to better understand how those outputs are generated by the neuronal model we developed.

Bio: Dr. Knopf is a nurse researcher whose research program reflects her commitment to engaging marginalized populations in the resolution of disparities in the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. Her clinical background includes a fellowship in oncology nursing and clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, MD, and primary care for homeless adults in Washington, DC. She is a graduate of the community-oriented public health practice program at the University of Washington and remains deeply committed to community-engaged research. Dr. Knopf's doctoral work focused on HIV transmission dynamics from a sexual network perspective; specifically, she worked on a pilot study of an intervention designed to disrupt HIV transmission through sexual networks by reducing the prevalence of concurrent (or temporally overlapping) sexual partnerships. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Knopf turned her attention to emerging biomedical HIV prevention technologies, such as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and their translation into the everyday lives of populations at risk for HIV infection. Dr. Knopf has two active research projects that explore adolescents’ and parents’ perspectives on the ethical challenges of enrolling minor adolescents in biomedical HIV prevention trials.

Bio: Dr. Lang focuses on understanding communication and media from a dynamic human centered complex systems perspective. She is particularly interested in rethinking communication theories as changes in qualitative states occurring over time rather than as reductive, additive, linear, processes. Her recent work focuses on the dynamics of persuasion, the role of the body in attitude change, destabilizing real world attractors through game play, and on how direct perception bypasses the mind to affect our motivational responses.

Bio: Lee has been a member of the Indiana University faculty since 2009. His research focuses on a wide range of issues concerning public opinion and media effects. Lee’s latest question is about how the new media environment influences public opinion and political communication process. Lee received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Lee worked as a reporter and editor in South Korea and in Chicago.

Bio: I work in the newly-formed Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering, where I am helping to start the bioengineering track. My work involves developing sophisticated, multiscale models of tissues and organisms that show dynamical cross-talk and feedbacks between networks at multiple scales: genetics, epigenetics, RNA transcription, protein dynamics, cell phenotype, cell and tissue mechanics, multicellular communications through chemical and mechanical signals, tissue remodeling, networked physiologic subsystems (e.g., immune system, cardiovascular system, etc.), organism-scale health/behavior, and the epidemiologic scale that emerges from the distribution of individual traits. Most of my prior work has focused on cancer and tissue biology, and I am now expanding to other areas such as cognitive health. I have developed and maintain several open source packages for simulation investigations of these dynamical multiscale systems, and I also lead an international group in creating a data standard / data model for these problems.

Bio: My current research involves analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data regarding student experiences, performance and engagement in science education from middle school through graduate school. More recently, we've begun work that uses eye tracking technologies to study the interpretation of data by students and scientists in classroom and field-based settings.

Bio: Gerardo Maupomé is an oral health researcher with primary interests in dental health services research and oral epidemiology, oral treatment needs among patients at high risk of disease or subject to health and social disparities, and analysis of professional practices – including how dental professionals make therapeutic decisions. He has worked in the private sector and in academia for the past 25 years. He is a Professor with Indiana University School of Dentistry since 2005, and currently has various affiliations with academic organizations in the USA (including IUNI) and in the UK. Dr. Maupomé has been involved in various research projects – spanning from epidemiological studies assessing the impact of public health fluoridation, to clinical trials of chlorhexidine varnishes; from community demonstrations to promote healthier lifestyle decisions, to quantitative appraisals of factors contributing to poor oral health and failure to access dental services; and from qualitative investigations into social and economic determinants of health, to economic analyses of the costs implied in health conditions and associated therapeutic procedures. Some of these studies have been focused on American Indians, people of Mexican and Hispanic origin, those 65 years of age and older, children, and population groups with restricted access to dental services.

Bio: Ann McCranie is the Associate Director at Indiana University Network Science Institute, responsible for general administration, proposal development, educational outreach, and conference and talk planning. She is currently co-principal investigator with Santo Fortunato on an NSF-funded collaboration with Northeastern University, AccelNet-MultiNet, an effort to support an international network of multilayer/multilevel network science. She is also the general organizer of Networks 2021: A Joint Sunbelt and NetSci Conference, to be held in July 2021 in Washington, DC. McCranie received her PhD in Sociology from IUB. Her research has been focused on networks in several domains: personal networks and health decision making, networks within organization and how they impact change, and networks between researchers in the mental health services field. McCranie has also served as the managing editor for Network Science and as summer program faculty teaching network analysis for the University of Michigan's ICPSR Summer Program since 2011. She is the co-author of Recovery in Mental Health: A Critical Sociological Account.

Bio: Dr. Melo is assistant professor at the Department of Economics at Indiana University Bloomington. He received his PhD in Social Sciences, from California Institute of Technology, June 2013. His research interest are Game Theory, Microeconomic theory, Economic and Social Networks, and Applied Econometrics. From 2013-2015, did his Postdoc at the Cornell Theory of Computation group and the Center for the Interface of Networks, Computing, and Economics (CINCE). He was junior researcher at the Central Bank of Chile, January 2006 to August 2008.

Bio: Dr. Nir Menachemi serves as Chair of the Health Policy and Management department of the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and holds the rank of Professor. He also holds an appointment as Affiliated Scientist with the Regenstrief Institute. Dr. Menachemi’s research examines how organizational strategies (e.g., health information technology adoption) impact critical performance measures, including quality outcomes and financial performance. In addition, he has published extensively on health policy and public health topics ranging from obesity issues to the impact of various laws or policies on health outcomes.

Bio: Filippo Menczer is a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, Bloomington, with courtesy appointments in cognitive science and physics. He holds a Laurea in Physics from the Sapienza University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Menczer is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a Fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication, a Senior Research Fellow of The Kinsey Institute, and a board member of the IU Network Science Institute. He previously served as division chair in the IUB School of Informatics and Computing, director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, visiting scientist at Yahoo Research, Fellow of the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Torino, Italy, and Fellow-at-large of the Santa Fe Institute. He has been the recipient of Fulbright, Rotary Foundation, and NATO fellowships, and a Career Award from the National Science Foundation. His research, supported by the NSF, DoD, McDonnell Foundation, and Democracy Fund, focuses on Web and data science, social network analysis, social computation, Web mining, and modeling of complex information networks. His work on the spread of information and misinformation in social media has been covered in many US and international news sources, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, CNN, BBC, Economist, Guardian, Atlantic, Reuters, Science, and Nature. Menczer received multiple service awards and currently serves as associate editor of the Network Science journal and on the editorial boards of EPJ Data Science and PeerJ Computer Science.

Bio: Wendy Miller is an Assistant Professor at IU School of Nursing. She has expertise in chronic disease self-management, particularly in the condition of epilepsy. She is the Director of the IU School of Nursing Social Network Health Research Lab.

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor of Surgery at Indiana University, a surgeon at the Indiana University Health Academic Health Center, and health services researcher and implementation scientist. My work is broadly focused on understanding and improving cancer and surgical care delivery to older adults. In addition to conducting research leveraging large databases to understand cancer care patterns, I am interested in using systems science and the tools of network analysis to better understand and improve cancer care delivery in integrated healthcare systems. At current, with collaborators, I am developing machine learning methods to passively predict postoperative delirium, a common and devastating complication that is difficult to recognize at scale, from routinely collected unstructured and structured health care data. We hope to test the feasibility and efficacy of deploying this passive digital marker for delirium risk in a clinical environment! t to augment provider decision-making. My work has been funded by the AHRQ, the American College of Surgeons, the Hartford Foundation, and the NIH.

Bio: Dr. Newman earned her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a focus in medical imaging. Afterwards she worked as a postdoctoral associate at Carnegie Mellon with Marcel Just and Patrica Carpenter in the Psychology Department. Dr. Newman came to IU in 2004 and is the current director of the Indiana University Imaging Research Facility.

Bio: Dr. Nho’s research expertise is in the areas of bioinformatics, imaging informatics, and medical informatics. After his postdoctoral years in computational physics, he refocused his career on biomedical informatics (BMI). In particular, he have become interested in bringing together bio-, medical, and imaging informatics methodologies in an integrated manner to study the genetic etiology of complex diseases. Dr. Nho’s career goal is to integrate bio-, medical, and imaging informatics strategies to perform next generation sequence analysis and deeply understand the pathogenetics of complex diseases.

Bio: Dr. Nudelman is a postdoctoral fellow studying genetic and physiological factors influencing cognitive dysfunction and neurodegeneration in older adults. Her current projects include the study of microRNA regulatory network heterogeneity in Alzheimer's disease.

Bio: My program of research focuses on understanding and developing interventions to improve the mental health and wellbeing of families and their adolescents with Oppositional Defiant Disorders and Conduct Disorders with special emphasis on low income and African American families. My research provides insights into factors underlying frequent and trying interactions between families and child serving system professionals (i.e., mental health clinics, schools, juvenile justice, and child welfare) and the use of social network-based strategies to improve families’ efficacy needs and reduce caregiving stress.

Bio: John Paolillo is Associate Professor of Informatics. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. His past research concerns the relationship of social networks to the emergence of semantic coherence in social media sites, such as del.iciou.us, LiveJournal and YouTube, among others, and his current research extends this approach to the distinct ideologies behind YouTube videos related to conspiracy theories

Bio: Dr. Irene Park is Assistant Research Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine—South Bend. Broadly, Dr. Park’s research examines sources of risk and resilience in the mental health of immigrant and racial/ethnic minority populations. Using an ecological approach, Dr. Park seeks to understand the sociocultural contexts in which ethnic minority youths reside, particularly the contexts of culture and family, as they relate to youths’ mental health. She is interested in understanding how personal and sociocultural networks influence mental health outcomes, health disparities, and access to mental health services. Currently, Dr. Park is investigating racial/ethnic discrimination and mental health in Latino families, with the aim of identifying mediating mechanisms (e.g., anger regulation) and risk/protective factors in the discrimination—mental health link among Mexican-origin adolescents; this research is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Park received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed an NIH-funded postdoctoral research fellowship through the Family Research Consortium at the University of California, Davis, focusing on family processes and child/adolescent mental health in diverse contexts. Dr. Park served on the faculty in the Psychology Department at the University of Notre Dame before joining the faculty at the Indiana University School of Medicine in 2013.

Bio: Siyun Peng is Assistant Research Scientist of Sociology at Indiana University. His research interests lie in the areas of aging, health inequalities, social networks, family, and quantitative & computational methods. He has a broad background in sociology, gerontology, and statistics, with specific training and expertise in adopting a life course perspective to examine social determinants of health. He is currently doing research using network analysis to understand whether enriching social relations can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. In addition, He is using medical claims data to examine health inequality in the US.

Bio: Brea Perry is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, and received a Ph.D. in Sociology from IU in 2008. Prior to returning to Indiana in 2014, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky, where she founded and directed the interdisciplinary Health, Society, and Populations Program. Her research and teaching interests include social networks, medical sociology, mental illness, biosociology, social genetics, and quantitative methodology. One line of research focuses on complex interactions between genotypes, social statuses, and social environmental conditions (GxExE) in substance use pathways. Dr. Perry also studies personal social network dynamics and processes that accompany progression through illness careers. Much of her work employs egocentric social network analysis and multilevel and longitudinal modeling. Dr. Perry’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the McManus Foundation. She is currently the series editor of Advances in Medical Sociology.

Bio: Bernice A. Pescosolido is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research. Professor Pescosolido received a B.A. from the University of Rhode Island in 1974 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1982. She has focused her research and teaching on social issues in health, illness, and healing. Pescosolido's research agenda addresses how social networks connect individuals to their communities and to institutional structures, providing the "wires" through which people's attitudes and actions are influenced. This agenda encompasses three basic areas: Health care services, stigma, and suicide research. In the early 1990s, Pescosolido developed the Network-Episode Model, which was designed to focus on how individuals come to recognize and respond to the onset of health problems, and use health care services. Specifically, it has provided new insights to understanding the patterns and pathways to care, adherence to treatment and the outcome of health care. As a result, she has served on advisory agenda-setting efforts at the NIMH, NCI, NHLBI, NIDRR, OBSSR, and presented at congressional briefings.

Bio: Dr. Aina Puce studies the brain basis of non-verbal communication and use mainly EEG and fMRI methods for experimentation. She is specifically interested in interactions between top-down vs bottom-up processing in the human brain.

Bio: Dr. Radicchi has a M.Sc. in Physics at University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Physics at Jacobs University Bremen in 2007. He has been a Research Scientist at ISI Foundation in Turin, a postdoctoral fellow in the Amaral Laboratory at Northwestern University, and a senior researcher at University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. He joined IU in 2013 as an assistant professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. His research activity focuses on the application of methods and tools of statistical physics to the study of complex systems and networks.

Bio: I am currently working on understanding how to use social and digital networks to lessen the impact of false or biased communication and reputation responses in an online justice system.

Bio: Professor Razo's research interests are in the field of comparative politics, with special interests in the political economy of development and comparative analysis of networks and institutions. His research and teaching center around two themes: (1) how political institutions in developing countries affect economic performance; and (2) the study of political institutions and political organization in nondemocratic settings. Current research projects include the development of an ontology and linguistic corpus for comparative analysis of networks in international development. He teaches courses on networks and institutions, quantitative contextual analysis, development, positive political economy, and Latin American politics. He is the author of Social Foundations of Limited Dictatorship, published by Stanford University Press in 2008, which advances a network theory of private policymaking. A student of economic history, he is also co-author with Stephen Haber and Noel Maurer of The Politics of Property Rights (2003).

Bio: Dr. Saykin is the Raymond C. Beeler Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine where he serves as director of the Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center and of the IU Center for Neuroimaging. He also holds appointments in Medical and Molecular Genetics, Neurology and Psychiatry. Before joining Indiana University in 2006 he served on the faculties of Dartmouth Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Saykin serves as Genetics Core leader of the NIA-sponsored multicenter Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Other collaborative federally sponsored projects examine cognitive changes associated with cancer chemotherapy, brain injury and schizophrenia. Dr. Saykin is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Brain Imaging and Behavior. His current research program focuses on the integration of structural, functional and molecular brain imaging with genomic and biomarker methods to study mechanisms of memory dysfunction and therapeutic response. Major goals include development of tools for early detection of dysregulated brain networks in older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and identification of novel therapeutic targets based on imaging genetics association studies.

Bio: Dr. Li Shen holds a B.S. degree from Xi'an Jiao Tong University, an M.S. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and a Ph.D. degree from Dartmouth College, all in Computer Science. Dr. Shen is an Associate Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), and Associate Director of IU Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CCBB). He is the Executive Director of the MICCAI Society Board of Directors. He is a member of the Center for Neuroimaging, the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Stark Neurosciences Research Institute at IUSM, and IU Network Science Institute. He is also affiliated with Departments of CIS, ECE and Biostatistics, and School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI. His research interests include medical image computing, bioinformatics, data mining, and network science. The central theme of his lab is focused on developing computational and informatics methods for integrative analysis of multimodal imaging data, high throughput "omics" data, fluid and cognitive biomarker data, and rich biological knowledge such as pathways and networks, with applications to various complex disorders. The ultimate goal is to improve mechanistic understanding of disease processes and treatment responses for early diagnosis and therapeutics. His research is primarily funded by NIH (NLM, NIA, NIBIB, NIAAA, NCATS), NSF, DOD and NCAA. Further information about Dr. Shen's research activities is available at http://www.iu.edu/~shenlab/.

Bio: I'm an Assistant Professor of Informatics in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington. I am a Fellow of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication (CCMC). I am also an affiliated faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior (CISAB), the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI), and the Institute for Software Research (ISR) at the University of California, Irvine. I am interested in utilizing mixed methods approaches to tackle research problems in online and geographic communities. Specifically, my current research focuses on leveraging awareness of individual and community activities embedded in sensor technologies, smart devices, social media, and online forums in the design and construction of novel persuasive interfaces and civic engagement platforms that facilitate sustainable motivational and behavioral changes.

Bio: Abdulkader Sinno is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2002, was a CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 2002-03, a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, and a 2014-15 Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. His first book, Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2008; 2010 paperback edition) develops an organizational theory to explain the evolution and outcomes of civil wars, ethnic strife and other territorial conflicts. He is also editor of Muslims in Western Politics (Indiana University Press, 2009) and the author of articles and book chapters on Muslim minority political representation in Western liberal democracies, public attitudes towards Muslim immigration, the Arab Spring, conflict processes, and Islamist parties’ participation in elections. His articles are published in both qualitative (e.g. American Historical Review) and quantitative (e.g. Journal of Conflict Resolution) journals. He is also an amateur roboticist and certified machinist.

Bio: Timothy Slaper {slay-per} leads a research team engaged in industry and workforce analysis, economic impact studies, regional economic analyses, demographic estimates and projections, trade and foreign investment analysis, measuring innovation and educational performance and the drivers of regional economic growth. At the time of this writing, the team is putting the final touches on The Innovation Index 2.0. National in scope, The Innovation Index is a county-based dataset and web tool for economic development practitioners as well as policy makers and researchers to assess a region’s innovative capacity and economic performance. All the work that Timothy oversees puts analytical tools and practical research into the hands of economic development practitioners to help them address the challenges of economic development in today's rapidly changing world. Before the IBRC, Timothy served as Senior Economist on the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. He cut his teeth as an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Timothy earned his doctorate in economics at The American University in Washington DC and is an alumnus of Miami University (Ohio).

Bio: Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences Eliot Smith has pioneered the development of multi-agent models of information spread in social networks that draw on social psychological studies of social influence to incorporate realistic assumptions about how and when people will accept (and further transmit) the information they receive from others (Mason et al., 2007). Smith’s empirical studies and multi-agent modeling have focused on the cognitive and behavioral processes that occur when people receive information from others that differs from their own prior beliefs — processes that determine whether they accept the information and change their beliefs, ignore the information, or seek out further evidence to attempt to reconcile the inconsistency (Collins et al., 2011; Smith and Collins, 2009). Another investigation examined in depth strategies for processing inconsistent information and determining its validity (Smith, 2014). The multi-agent model led to the conclusion that people can best avoid misinformation by comparing incoming information to their own existing beliefs, and discarding it if it is too discrepant. Alternative strategies that are prominent in the literature — such as accepting new information if it comes from multiple independent sources — were found not to be useful. This is partly because people are not usually in a good position to know the overall structure of the social network and therefore cannot tell whether multiple information sources are truly independent of each other. That is, person A may hear the same information from both B and C and assume they are independent, when in fact both B and C might have obtained the information from a common source D.

Bio: After receiving an undergraduate degree in biochemistry, Olaf Sporns earned a PhD in neuroscience at Rockefeller University and then conducted postdoctoral work at The Neurosciences Institute in New York and San Diego. Currently he is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in Bloomington. His main research area is theoretical and computational neuroscience, with a focus on complex brain networks. He has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications as well as the recent books “Networks of the Brain” and “Discovering the Human Connectome”, both published by MIT Press. Sporns was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2011 and elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2013.

Bio: I am Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Most of my research considers the politics of global finance and other networked systems. Within this, I primarily focus on structural power in the world economy, the political nature of supposedly-technocratic economic institutions, theories of hegemonic financial (in)stability, the relationship between firm-level economic agents and political systems, and the ways in which changes in demographics and predominant technologies impact political economy. Most of this research employs quantitative methodologies. I teach courses pertaining to international political economy, international relations, and network methodologies. I took a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 and a B.A. in Economics from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2007.

Bio: Jingwen Yan is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Indiana University Network Science Institute. She obtained her PhD from Indiana University in Bioinformatics. She works in the Interdisciplinary area, where neuroscience meets computer science and bioinformatics. Her primary research focus is on structured sparse learning, their application in exploring the multi-level –omics network across biological domains and how these networks contribute to the complex disease progression. She also has a broad interest in computer visualization, big data frameworks and tool development.

Bio: Dr. Zhang is a bioinformatics researcher with focus on using network mining approach to integrate multi omics data for mechanism study, biomarker discovery and patient stratification in cancer and other diseases.