Duncan James Watts (born February 20, 1971) is a computational social scientist and a professor at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

. He was formerly a principal researcher at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

, and is known for his work on

small-world network A small-world network is a graph characterized by a high clustering coefficient and low distances. In an example of the social network, high clustering implies the high probability that two friends of one person are friends themselves. The l ...

Education

Watts received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in physics from the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was established in 1949. The university comprises seven faculties, through which it offers bachelor's, master's and docto ...

and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

, where his advisor was

Steven Strogatz Steven Henry Strogatz (; born August 13, 1959) is an American mathematician and author, and the Susan and Barton Winokur Distinguished Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his wor ...

Career

Watts joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in July 2019 as a PIK Professor. He has joint appointments in Engineering, Communications and Business. Watts was past external faculty member of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inc ...

and a former professor of

sociology Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of Interpersonal ties, social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. The term sociol ...

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

, where he headed the Collective Dynamics Group. He is also author of two books. His first, '' Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age'' is based on the six degrees research in his 1998 paper with

, in which the two presented a mathematical theory of the

small world phenomenon The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggest ...

. His second book, ''Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us,'' explains common errors people make when making decisions especially for groups or organizations, and suggests alternative methods using research and data. He also presents some of his research from Yahoo and Microsoft, and comments on the work of some popular nonfiction writers like

Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published eight books. He is also the host of the podcast ''Revisionist ...

. Until April 2012, he was a principal research scientist at

Yahoo! Research Yahoo!, once one of the most popular web sites in the United States, is as of September 2021 a content sub-division of the namesake company Yahoo Inc., owned by Apollo Global Management (90%) and Verizon Communications (10%). It has offered a wide ...

, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. Watts joined

in New York City by its opening on May 3, 2012.Floridia, Richard
"Why Microsoft Chose New York City"
, ''The Atlantic: Cities'', 2 May 2012. Retrieved on 8 May 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 Financial risk management is the practice of protecting Value (economics), economic value in a business, firm by managing exposure to financial risk - principally credit risk and market risk, with more specific variants as listed aside - as well ...

, and organizational design."Home page of Duncan Watts at Yahoo Research
More recently he has attracted attention for his modern-day replication of

Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist known for his controversial Milgram experiment, experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale University, Yale.Blass, T ...

small world experiment The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was groundbreaking in that it suggeste ...

using email messages and for his studies of popularity and fads in on-line and other communities. In Watts's early career, from 2002 to 2007, he was a frequent collaborator of Peter Sheridan Dodds, now at the University of Vermont's Vermont Complex Systems Center.

References

External links

Duncan Watts page at Microsoft
{{DEFAULTSORT:Watts, Duncan J. 1971 births Living people Australian physicists Australian sociologists Columbia University faculty Complex systems scientists Cornell University alumni University of New South Wales alumni American network scientists University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science faculty